Making the web speedier and safer with SPDY

JAN 26, 2012

Will

Roberto

By Roberto Peon and Will Chan, Software Engineers

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

In the two years since we announced SPDY, we’ve been working with the web community on evolving the spec and getting SPDY deployed on the Web.

Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.

We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we're actively working on a full featured mod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.

Given SPDY's rapid adoption rate, we’re working hard on acceptance tests to help validate new implementations. Our best practices document can also help website operators make their sites as speedy as possible.

With the help of Mozilla and other contributors, we’re pushing hard to finalize and implement SPDY draft-3 in early 2012, as standardization discussions for SPDY will start at the next meeting of the IETF.

We look forward to working even more closely with the community to improve SPDY and make the Web faster!

To learn more about SPDY, see the link to a Tech Talk here, with slides here.

Roberto Peon and Will Chan co-lead the SPDY effort at Google. Roberto leads SPDY server efforts and continues to tell people to be unafraid of trying to change the world for the better. Will works on the Chrome network stack and leads the Chrome SPDY efforts. Outside of work, Will enjoys traveling the world in search of cheap beer and absurd situations.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor