SPDY, pronounced “speedy”, is a new experimental protocol developed by Google to speed up the Internet and make it safer. HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) was never designed to efficiently download a large number of small files, it was meant to attend a single request each time. As the Internet age advanced websites kept adding elements like CSS (Cascade Style Sheets), external javascript, XML and images, all of those multiple elements needed to be downloaded together for the user to be able to view a webpage, resulting in bottlenecks and delays.
The ultramodern SPDY protocol ambition is to reduce website load, latency and increase security, it wants to replace parts of the old HTTP providing faster communication in between server and browser. SPDY uses less TCP connections wrapping up multiplexing in a single stream and manages TCP more efficiently prioritizing the resources needed to be send first, reducing upstream data and cutting down the number of handshakes, it also supports “server push” a technology that predicts what will be downloaded next, sending it to the browser before a request is made.
SPDY protocol status in Chrome browser
SPDY is turned on by default in Google Chrome, see it by typing “chrome://net-internals” into the Omnibox, and Firefox will turn it on in their next Firefox 13 release, to enable it now, go to “about:config“, search for “network.http.spdy.enabled” and set it to “true“. An Apache server SPDY module exists and Nginx based servers (used by Facebook and Hulu) and Jetty web servers (Ubuntu, Zimbra) will support it soon making it easy for webmasters to deploy SPDY, the protocol won’t work unless server and browser both support it.
Browsers that currently work with SDPY are Chrome, Firefox, SeaMonkey and Amazon Kindle Silk, the only websites I know of at this time supporting SDPY are Google services (Gmail, search,etc) and Twitter. Safari and Internet Explorer do not have immediate plans to support the protocol leaving half of the Internet population out and making it more difficult for the Internet Engineering Task Force ( IETF) in charge of the HTTP protocol to approve a backwards compatible neutral standard.
Compulsory SSL connection
The SPDY protocol makes it mandatory to encrypt all connections with websites using SSL, webmasters must install a SSL certificate in their servers for this endeavor. As good as it seems, various webmasters have objected to the approach arguing that when you multiply millions of SSL encryption and decryption requests the server CPU hardware needs a hardware upgrade and extra arrangements for heat dissipation provoking costs to go up.
The second problem is that requiring all webmasters to have an SSL certificate will end up with many of them not bothering renewing the certificates and users will start to get used to see “expired digital certificate” warnings clicking on the ignore button without even reading it.