Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker

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TLDR

  • Browser tool re-compresses ZIP files using libdeflate via WebAssembly, cutting size 5-30% while preserving backwards compatibility.

Key Takeaways

  • Uses libdeflate compiled to WASM to re-compress Deflate entries at higher effort; Zopfli achieves marginally better ratios but is much slower.
  • Strips per-entry metadata comments and directory entries; empty directories are lost as a side effect.
  • Works on APK, EPUB, and JAR since they are ZIP-based formats; Signal APK shrank 30%, Linux source 5.6%, Project Gutenberg EPUB 18%.
  • libdeflate.js, the WASM wrapper, was published separately as reusable open-source output from this project.
  • Tradeoff is explicit: formats like .tar.bz2 compress better but break backwards compatibility; this tool stays within the ZIP spec.

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