Posted on Tuesday, February 10 2015 @ 14:48 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Google decides to throw in the towel and retires its SPDY protocol. This open but non-standard protocol was supported since Chrome 6 and promised as much as a 55 percent speed increase for the Internet's highest-traffic websites. Most of its benefits are present in HTTP/2 though, so the search giant lays its SPDY to rest. Web users are unlikely to notice a difference as Google was one of the only companies that actually used SPDY.
"Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it's time to say goodbye," Google engineer Chris Bentzel wrote in a blog post on Monday.
Not that there are any sour grapes or anything. Bentzel didn't bother to toot Google's own horn in his post, observing only that, "Some key features [of HTTP/2] such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY."
Further information about how the ideas of SPDY went on to become the starting point for HTTP/2 and criticism on this decision can be read at
The Register.
