14 DAY TRIAL // In late 2009 Google introduced the SPDY protocol, its take on improving the tried and trusted HTTP with a speedier alternative. The controlled experiments proved quite encouraging, but Google hasn't said much since.
It hasn't stood still though, Google continued to work on the implementation and now Strangeloop is promising its customers the same benefits that Google sees, with the first commercial implementation of the protocol.
Strangeloop offers a service promising faster load times to its customers, so adding support for SPDY makes sense. The company now boasts that its the first to offer this technology to the web at large.
SPDY aims to speed up websites by replacing the HTTP protocol, in a way. It's not a direct replacement, rather it works to improve the parts of HTTP that can be sped up and has several tricks up its sleeve to make things faster.
"SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression," Google explained at launch.
So far, the only browser to support the protocol is Google Chrome, unsurprisingly. Google has started deploying the protocol for some of its websites and services, but it hasn't said much since it's still not done implementing it.
But Google created SPDY as an open protocol, one aimed at the web at large. While it's probably not confident in it enough for a big push to get it adopted by other browser makers and websites, it wants to see some real-world use which is why it worked with Strangeloop to get things going.
Strangeloop relies on several ways of speeding up websites, mostly by doing HTML optimization. The service takes into account the browser used for this optimization and now, if it detects that Chrome is used, it switches to SPDY rather than plain old HTTP.