14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has announced that the latest Firefox nightly builds now have support, disabled by default, for the SPDY protocol. Initially developed by Google, SPDY is an improvement of the age old HTTP which aims to cut down on connection times by taking a few shortcuts and optimizing some steps.
It's not a new protocol, just an improvement of the existing one. Google introduced it in 2009 and later built it into Google Chrome.
Most of its sites now support it and benefit from a speed boost in Chrome. Google opened up SPDY in the hope that it will be adopted by others and that it will eventually become standard.
However, the specifications themselves are far from complete and SPDY is still regarded as being in draft form. Even if it is enabled in Chrome, so far, the Google sites are the biggest that uses it.
Amazon uses it in its Silk browser for the Kindle Fire, but only for the connection to its own Web Services cloud.
Now, Mozilla has made the first step and is including support for it in Firefox 11. However, it is disabled by default and it will remain disabled for the foreseeable future.
Even if it has been included in Firefox 11, there are no plans of landing it as a complete feature in any Firefox version at this point. Support for SPDY was an expected feature in Firefox 11.
The fact that it is experimental technology, that the specifications are still changing and that Google may have made changes or enabled features outside of the specs with the knowledge that they'd work in Chrome, is keeping Mozilla from being too bold with SPDY for now.
"We've landed an implementation of a draft of the SPDY spec, and that will be available in Firefox Nightly builds tomorrow (or so). In order to test it out, you must change change the network.http.spdy.enabled preference to true in about:config; the default configuration does not have SPDY enabled.
"Our implementation needs a lot more testing, especially since there are already very important SPDY-enabled sites live on the Internet," Mozilla's Brian Smith wrote.
"Even if we spit out a perfect implementation of the latest draft spec on the first attempt, it might be the case that these existing sites depend on behavior undefined by the spec and/or bugs in Chrome," he said.
"There is also still work that needs to be done on the spec itself. I suspect there will be many rounds of divergence and convergence in SPDY implementations as more people experiment with implementing it, and as the protocol improves," he added.