How to enable Google Storage gzip during AJAX request

Question

I'm accessing JSON files stored in a bucket on Google Storage directly using an AJAX request. However to optimize the communication I want to enable gzip encoding.

The docs say I have to send an Accept-Encoding header and an altered User-Agent (containing gzip). Accept-Encoding is no problem, however altering your User-Agent is not possible, the w3c even specifies so.

How can I still enable gzipping while doing these request?

Answer 1

If you'd like to download your files with gzip encoding, they need to be stored in Google Cloud Storage with that encoding already applied, as well as with the appropriate metadata (Content-Encoding: gzip and proper content type, in this case Content-Type: application/json). If you subsequently request these objects with the Accept-Encoding: gzip request header, GCS will serve them with gzip encoding.

Edited to add: "gzip" in the user agent string is no longer required (but doesn't hurt either) -- I've requested that the docs be updated accordingly.