With SPDY a faster web then with HTML
12 november 2009 | 
Google is apparently in the early stages of a research project that appears to aim as high as perhaps replacing the HTTP protocol, the fundamental technology that essentially makes the World Wide Web possible.
In a somewhat obscure post on the Chromium blog (see ‘A 2x Faster Web’ -Dré), the development branch of their Chrome browser, Google reveals they’ve been working on a new protocol dubbed SPDY for “SPeeDY” for its goal of making the web faster.
While HTTP is an “elegantly simple protocol” that has powered the web since 1996, the tone of Google’s post is almost patronizing, as if HTTP were our doddering old uncle that’s had his day and needs to be put out to pasture. Then again, Google’s hubris is perhaps warranted as one of the only companies with enough clout and resources to indeed spur on the “evolution of websites and browsers” with an entirely new protocol designed to speed up the communication between web servers and clients.
They reveal they’ve already got a prototype web server and a Chrome client with built-in SPDY support that they’ve been testing in the lab. With these tools they’ve reportedly been able to see an up to 55% speed increase in page loading, and feel like the project is now stable enough to warrant soliciting feedback from the web community. The SPDY documentation is now available, as well as the source code. Google encourages feedback on the new protocol in the Chromium Google Group.
Source: Mashable.com
Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced “SPeeDY”, an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.
We started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate. Today, web clients and servers speak HTTP. HTTP is an elegantly simple protocol that emerged as a web standard in 1996 after a series of experiments. HTTP has served the web incredibly well. We want to continue building on the web’s tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers. So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support.
So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance – pages loaded up to 55% faster. There is still a lot of work we need to do to evaluate the performance of SPDY in real-world conditions. However, we believe that we have reached the stage where our small team could benefit from the active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community.
For those of you who would like to learn more and hopefully contribute to our experiment, we invite you to review our early stage documentation, look at our current code and provide feedback through the Chromium Google Group.
Source: The Chromium Blog
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