Zstandard, or “zstd”, is a data compression mechanism described in RFC8878. It is a fast lossless compression algorithm, targeting real-time compression scenarios at zlib-level and better compression ratios. The "zstd" token was added as an IANA-registered Content-Encoding token as per https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8878#name-content-encoding. Adding support for "zstd" as a Content-Encoding will help load pages faster and use less bandwidth, and spend less time and CPU/power on compression on our servers, resulting in reduced server costs.
Supporting zstd content-encoding in the browser would allow sites to spend less time and CPU/power on compression on their servers, resulting in reduced server costs. There are several published benchmarks and existing research showing promising potential wins. Zstd is roughly three times faster than Brotli for decompression. Combined with zstd being faster at compression, this will result in faster page load times.
Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aDyUw4mAzRdLyZyXpVgWvO-eLpc4ERz7I_7VDIPo9Hc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/14dbzMpsYPfkefAJos124uPrlkvW7jyPJhzjujSWws2k/edit?usp=sharing