How rewarding it would be if your multibillion-dollar enterprise that depends on the internet gets a Web speed-accelerating solution that opens up more markets for your online business. That’s what Google is looking forward to after scoring a victory to its efforts in developing its Web-boosting technology called SPDY.
Earlier, the chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group, Mark Nottingham, announced the group’s SPDY support in overhauling the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, the data communications foundation of the Web. Google pins its hopes that SPDY will free up online bottlenecks.
The working group is part of the IETF or the Internet Engineering Task Force and is tasked to spruce up the aging 1999-based HTTP1.1. According to Nottingham, there is now a ”broad agreement that the time is ripe to start work on a new version of HTTP in the IETF, and that it should happen in this Working Group.” Nottingham recalls that initial efforts to refurbish HTTP1.1 was met with a lukewarm interest but with SPDY, there’s more enthusiasm and the completion of a draft HTTP 2.0 is expected this May and to be completed in July next year.
The SPDFY white paper details how it works, using a few tricks to accelerate Web page loading through prioritization and compression of important page elements while sidestepping technical limits of multiple network connections.
Altering the basics of the web can be risky given the wide variety of browser behavior, networks and servers between the users the web page hosts. But Google has progressed a lot with SPDY since it was unveiled in 2009 before incorporating it into the company’s Chrome browser. It appears that the search engine leader is positioned to rebuild the World Wide Web owning the world’s most visited website supported by an army of researchers and engineers that make thinking big possible.
Google’s research has shown that SPDY accelerates client loading times of web pages by 28%. It can reach 43% speed boosts over broadband 2Mbps DSL and up to 44% – 55% over 4Mbps cable line. Google, though, is not alone in pushing for SPDY as the world’s number two browser Firefox 11 also supports it along with Amazon’s Silk browser on the Kindle Fire reader tablet. Now what does SPDY stand for? Nothing. It just sounds like “speedy” an apt description of what it does.
