We're leaving Cloudflare – here's why – Pale Moon

Summary: the author is worried about Brotli compression (like existing gzip but 20% better) for HTTP protocol. Both Firefox and Chrome require HTTPS for Brotli; but Pale Moon authors disagree and enable Brotli even on plain HTTP connections.<p>Unfortunately, Cloudfare sides with Firefox and Chrome and does not offer Brotli on HTTP, citing old studies of proxies breaking when exposed to Brotli. They are also telling the author to go away in corporate-speak. The author, however, is unsatisfied and asks:<p>&gt; What is the real (undisclosed to me) reason they won&#x27;t consider even the possibility of Brotli being enabled for clients who support it? ... I can only conclude there&#x27;s some agenda here that I&#x27;m being kept in the dark about...

Why go to war over something trivial like this? None of the major browsers support http&#x2F;2 nor Brotli over plain http connections - if not for COVID they probably wouldn’t support plain http connections at all. They were set to depreciate those but held off at the start of the pandemic because so many government sites were still http only. You have to go with flow sometimes. If you want to ask Cloudflare a favor then not re-compressing my highly optimized zopfli source files with standard gzip would be a good one. Passing through the accept-encoding header so I can send my highly compressed brotli responses instead of them repacking my gzip responses would be another. At least the option to select those behaviors if the mom and pops can’t be trusted to do it right.

Is this a case of Cloudflare not honouring&#x2F;forwarding the content-encoding header?<p>Maybe there is a limitation in the way their caching works that it cant differentiate between different encodings, and therefore just requests and caches the most commonly supported encoding?<p>Why would this be different over https? Why isn&#x27;t https == http + s? When did that break, and why did we let it?<p>If we don&#x27;t want doubly-compressed content (for security&#x2F;superior compression&#x2F;whatever), surely it should be up to the browser not to request that encoding, rather than baking it in at some other layer?

It makes little difference either way. Pale Moon is a browser, many sites use CF even if Pale Moon chooses not to. Perhaps there&#x27;s some accelerator feature of Pale Moon that uses their CF CDN but I&#x27;m not interested in a minor product that isn&#x27;t self aware.

i would love to see someone from CF&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;chrome team to jump in and share the reason why :)