[citation needed] Google employees Jyrki Alakuijala and Zoltán Szabadka initially developed Brotli in 2013 to decrease the size of transmissions of WOFF web font.

[4] The Internet Engineering Task Force approved the Brotli compressed data format specification as an informational request for comment (RFC 7932) in July 2016.

The predefined dictionary contains over 13000 common words, phrases and other substrings derived from a large corpus of text and HTML documents.

This enables decoding on mobile phones with limited resources, but makes Brotli underperform on compression benchmarks having larger files.

A formal validation of the Brotli specification was independently implemented by Mark Adler,[5]: 126  one of the co-authors of the zlib/gzip compression format and library.

[16] The reference implementation does ship a command-line program brotli similar to gzip,[17] but use in the Unix-like world as a simple compressor is scarce.