title: Why do real-world servers prefer gzip over deflate encoding?
body: <p>We already know <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388595/why-use-deflate-instead-of-gzip-for-text-files-served-by-apache">deflate encoding is a winner</a> over gzip with respect to speed of encoding, decoding and compression size.</p>
  
  <p>So why do no large sites (that I can find) send it (when I use a browser that accepts it)?</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip" rel="noreferrer">Yahoo claims</a> deflate is "less effective". Why?</p>
  
  <p>I maintain HTTP server software that prefers deflate, so I'd like to know if there's some really good reason not to continue doing so.</p>