This one’s weird.
Life beyond HTTP 1.1: Google’s SPDY – igvita.com
A while back, Google Chrome dropped the http from its location bar. This seemed like a decision based on cosmetic and usability concerns.
Maybe not, since now Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) who joined Google from the PostRank acquisition in June is saying that Google’s web services are not running over HTTP, but rather over SPDY (SPeeDY), Google research project and an application-level protocol for transporting web content.
In other words, SPDY is a replacement protocol for HTTP, and Google’s servers are using SPDY to serve content to Chrome-based browsers.
This is all happening transparently to the user. If you copy a Google URL from Chrome’s location bar and paste it, the http is added. This makes sense, given that other browsers wouldn’t understand a spdy-based URL. I can’t find any evidence that SDPY is in use.
All this makes sense given Google’s obsession with speed, but somehow this feels a bit odd and fracturing, given the centralized nature and adoption of the HTTP spec.
Thoughts?
The irony is that HTTP is actually a pretty rotten protocol for transferring content over the web… by tackling the latency bugaboo, SPDY is finally something that has a chance to replace HTTP.
I mean seriously… HTTP 1.1 has been around for FIFTEEN YEARS without any major improvements, despite MASSIVE evidence of issues. I hope that Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft all support it, and succeed in shaming the utterly useless W3C to implement it as HTTP 1.2
Completely agree, but do you see that happening? Pigs will fly right before, following the return of unmelted snowballs from Hell.
It’s a bit sneaky of Google, but it’s not like that many people would really care. Performance isn’t a sexy feature, but it’s a must-have.
well, it happened with HTML5 and the WHATWG group:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Hypertext_Application_Technology_Working_Group
The utterly useless W3C finally accepted HTML5 after Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Google, and (partially) Microsoft agreed to something without them. SPDY has a good chance of becoming HTTP 1.2, if they use the same tactics. Now that Google is shaming other browsers for being slow, I see no reason why competitors wouldn’t agree to a new HTTP spec to close the gap… regardless what the utterly useless W3C says.
In case you don’t know… I REALLY HATE THE W3C.
I did notice a touch of bias against the W3C. Standards move slowly, I guess. You might be on to something, but given the proprietary nature of SPDY and its lack of a clear open source license, I wonder how that would go.
Google might need a way to plug the Android dam, which has been leaking money of late.
i hope this feature not only be supported by chrome but also supported by other browsers. Chrome is the fast browser in the my PC .But , avant browser is the most stable browser in my PC.
Hopefully, but bc there are big companies involved who compete in several areas, it might not be that easy.
This isn’t news, really — here’s some discussion from six months ago with Chrome lead Mike Belshe confirming that Google and Chrome talk to each other using SPDY:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ
Don’t know whether it has anything to do with the Chrome UI decision to remove the http:// from the URL bar, though.
Good thing I’m not a reporter 😉 I think this is just trickling out now, given its low-level nature and the fact that it only affects Chrome for now.
Wanna see Chrome using spdy? Checkout the spdy tab in about:net-internals. This will show you all spdy based connections and lets you trace through the events.
__Sai
Nice tip, thanks. Pragmatic Programmers announced a SPDY book recently too. Suddenly it’s everywhere.