Google developer Mike Belshe posted some
thoughts on the future of SPDY, which addresses shortcomings of HTTP
and accelerates Internet connections. While not confirmed by Google or
any other company, a SPDY gateway that could enhance Internet
connections dramatically in the future.
It appears that Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet and the integrated Silk
browser that leverages acceleration via Amazon’s cloud services could
prompt some new thoughts how mobile web browser could get faster. An
intriguing idea is offered by Mike Belshe, who envisions SPDY to become
much more available than it is today. Instead of requiring individual
web servers to be configured for SPDY, ISPs could install SPDY gateways,
which would automatically support the technology for Chrome users as
well as Firefox users sometime in 2012.
SPDY
is designed to deal with some of the of problems in HTTP, which was
first documented in 1995 and related to web content that was much
simpler than what we are developing and consuming today. Both TCP and
HTTP have evolved into a bottleneck of data downloads and are constantly
under scrutiny how these protocols can be made much more efficient in
today’s world. HTTP is especially criticized for latency issues since
HTTP can only fetch one resource at a time and servers cannot
communicate with a client without a client request. HTTP also uses
uncompressed and redundant request and response headers. SPDY uses TCP
as the underlying transport layer and is available next to HTTP, but
offers far less latency.
SPDY supports unlimited connection streams, can prioritize and even
block requests if a communication channel gets overloaded and supports
header compression. SPDY also allows the server to communicate with a
client without a client request. SPDY still uses HTTP methods, headers
and “other semantics.” However, the connection management and data
transfer formats are modified. According to Google, SPDY decreases the
number of open connections per page, from 30-75 to just 7 or 8.
If Belshe has his way, a future SPDY would allow users to run
multiple tabs via a single SPDY connection stream through the carrier,
the network address translation table and the SPDY gateway into the
Internet: “Because SPDY can multiplex many connections, the browser can
now put literally every request onto a single SPDY connection,” he
writes. “Now, any time the browser needs to fetch a request, it can send
the request right away, without needing to do a DNS lookup, or a TCP
handshake, or even an SSL handshake. On top of that, every request is
secure, not just those that go to SSL sites.”
SPDY today is limited largely to Google sites, all of which support
the protocol (you can monitor SPDY connections via
chrome://net-internals in Chrome), and give Google a noticeable
performance advantage in its applications when they are accessed with
Chrome. Mozilla said that it will be adding
SPDY to Firefox in 2012, but there is no information from Microsoft if
IE will get SPDY support as well. If Belshe is right, the implications
for SPDY in a mobile web could web much greater than it is on the
desktop.
Daniel Bailey in Products on November 29
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