14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 15 has just landed in the Aurora channel, meaning it's ready for wider testing. One of the big new features is the built-in PDF viewer which is now good enough to be bundled with Firefox. But the latest Aurora has plenty of improvements under the hood as well.
One of the big new features is support for the latest draft version of SPDY, SPDY/3 or SPDY v3.
SPDY is an evolution of HTTP and is fully backwards compatible. The changes mostly focus on optimizing the protocol and adapting it to the modern web standards.
Even so, the improvements are very noticeable. What's more, since any improvement means that everything on the web become fastes, it all adds up.
But such a massive undertaking, revamping the underlying protocol of the entire web, can't be done in one fell swoop. As soon as new issues show up and are fixed, the draft version of the protocol is updated. This will continue for some time to come.
The importance of having support for the very latest draft version, even if it's not final, can't be overstated.
The protocol must get real-world usage and testing for it to be improved and that can't happen without browser support. What's more, without browser support, websites don't have any incentive to implement the updated protocol.
What's more, SPDY will serve as the foundation for HTTP 2.0 which is still some years from becoming a reality.
Having SPDY supported in its current form means that any major issues will be discovered in time and that the protocol will prove itself well before it becomes standard.
Google Chrome already supports SPDY/3 and most of Google's infrastructure now supports it as well. Firefox is the only other major browser to support SPDY, in any form.