Nov 12, 2009
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Google has made it well known that they have wanted the web to be faster for years. Yesterday on November 11th 2009, Google officially announced that they have been working on a research project called SPDY (pronounced speedy) which is a new application geared towards moving content across the web twice as fast.
The biggest goal of SPDY is to reduce the latency of pulling back websites through HTTP compression and other prioritization strategies. When Google came out with their Chromium Project and their new browser Google Chrome, Google made a big impact in making new headway in the way we browse websites.
HTTP (hyper text transfer protocol) has been around since 1996 and is still used today as browsers and servers communicate. The SPDY project involves the improving the time in which browsers and servers provide the website that a user is looking for.
Larry Page, co founder of Google, has said that he wanted the Chrome team to build the browser on slow computers so that they could bring back the fastest browser on the internet. He also has stated that there will be a time when we will be able to browse webpages as fast as we can turn pages in a book. With the evolution of new modern websites and multi-media flooding the web a need for improved web speed is necessary.
In the last few months Google has had a prototype server working along with the Google Chrome browser and the results show that pages have loaded up to 55% faster. The team is now far enough where they are willing to open it up and take some feedback from the web community.
Here is some of the SPDY documentation and code. You can provide feedback in the Chromium Google Group.