Google and Mozilla Working on SPDY Standard for a Faster Web

Google is working on all fronts to make the web faster. It's constantly optimizing its websites and services to squeeze out every last inch of performance, but it's also working on improving the underlying architecture of the web.

One project that attempts this is SPDY a version of the HTTP protocol built with speed in mind, as the name suggests.

"Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users," the two Google engineers that lead the SPDY project, wrote.

"For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search," they said.

Google has already received a lot of support from other interested parties and there is a community effort in implementing the updated protocol.

The ultimate goal is to standardize it. In the meantime, the goal is to reach a stable version of it, which can be implemented by most players involved, from browser makers to web servers.

"We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we're actively working on a full featured mod-spdy for Apache," Google explained.

In the short term, Google along with Mozilla and the others involved are working towards a 'draft-3' version of SPDY to be available early this year.

This is important since talks about SPDY standardization will start at the next meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, one of the standardization bodies that govern the internet.

That meeting is scheduled to take place in July this year and will be hosted by Google, so it's natural to expect it to focus a lot on SPDY and possibly other similar projects coming out of Mountain View.