GZIP
DEFLATE with a header — the web's favorite compression.
Where it came from
Gzip was written in 1992 by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free replacement for the patented compress utility. Its payload algorithm, DEFLATE (RFC 1951), combined LZ77 matching with Huffman coding — and became arguably the most deployed compression algorithm in history: HTTP responses, PNG images, ZIP entries, git objects.
How it works
The container is simple: a 10-byte header (magic `1f 8b`, flags, mtime), optionally a filename, then a raw DEFLATE stream, then CRC32 + length checks.
DEFLATE finds repeated byte sequences (LZ77 back-references) and Huffman-codes the result — repeated data costs almost nothing, random data barely shrinks.
On the web, `Content-Encoding: gzip` compresses HTML/CSS/JS by 70–80%. A .gz file holds exactly one stream — that's why tar.gz bundles exist: tar provides the many-files structure, gzip squeezes it.
Unpack GZIP files
Decompress .gz and .tar.gz locally — fflate does the DEFLATE, your browser does the rest.