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Assuming the server is set up correctly, modern browsers are able to automatically decompress .gzip files when they are downloaded. Is the same true for a .tar.gz file?

For example, say you have an HTML5 game with a lot of assets. It would make sense to compress the assets (game models, sound, etc.) into a single .tar file, and then (I assume) compress it again into a .gzip file. Will anything special need to be done on the client side to unpack them? Or is there a better approach to compressing assets on the server, making my question as-is sort of moot?

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  • Is this programming related? Maybe stackoverflow would be better. Or if web servers then serverfault.
    – Xen2050
    Jan 31, 2019 at 11:33
  • @Xen2050 Yeah I wasn't too sure which site to ask it on. I'm not looking for a coding solution, I'm just trying to understand if I'll need to come up with a coding solution. But I first am just wondering if I can store assets on the server in a single compressed .tar.gz folder.
    – sme
    Jan 31, 2019 at 11:38
  • Did you try it? What happens?
    – Xen2050
    Jan 31, 2019 at 12:08
  • Not yet; I don't have access my server at the moment
    – sme
    Jan 31, 2019 at 12:15

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The short answer is, the browser doesn't.

Most web servers can transparently gzip the data being sent to your browser to save on transmission time, but gzip is just a compression algorithm. tar, on the other hand, is a format used for batching files together into a single archive.

The longer answer is that it's the interplay between two different HTTP headers: Content-Encoding and Content-Type.

When you hit a webpage that uses gzip, you're receiving a Content-Type of text/html with a Content-Encoding of gzip. The browser knows how to handle text/html, and so it transparently uncompresses the response and renders it on your screen.

When you download a .gz or a tar file, you're receiving something with a Content-Type of application/x-gzip (or x-tar or x-tar-gz), which prompts the browser to treat the data as a file download, rather than trying to do anything with it on its own.

There's no such thing as a Content-Encoding of tar, since that header is only ever used to advertise a type of compression - so sending a .tar.gz file to a browser with gzip encoding would be pointless and wasteful. The data is already compressed.

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