14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced that QUIC, its next generation networking protocol, is stable enough to get pushed to the Chrome dev and Canary channels. The protocol is still in testing and will only be enabled for some users with some Google sites.
Google's SPDY seemed like a pipe dream only a few years ago, but the company made great progress in getting others to adopt the technology. The fact that the technology is solid and that Google has the biggest site on the Internet and the most popular browser probably helped.
Now, Google is trying to do the same for QUIC, yet another Internet protocol designed, as the name and your intuition suggest, for speed.
QUIC is a bolder approach than SPDY, but it also has the potential for greater benefits, particularly in situations where connections aren't great, on mobile devices for example.
With QUIC, Google tries to solve problems that SPDY can't, in particular, to reduce the number of requests needed for any Internet connection.
"To continue improving network performance we need to decrease the number of round trips, something that is difficult with protocols that currently rely on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)," Google explained.
"QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is an early-stage network protocol we are experimenting with that runs a stream multiplexing protocol over a new flavor of Transport Layer Security (TLS) on top of UDP instead of TCP," it said.
Google has several major goals with QUIC. The biggest is to reduce latency in any way possible. This is done by reducing the number of round trips needed to establish and maintain a connection.
It's also done by reducing the number of packets that need sending, both by pacing the rate of transmission to avoid losses and by adding error correction mechanisms that reduce the number of packets that need to be resent.
Finally, QUIC also ditches TCP in favor of UDP, a lighter and faster protocol which comes with less overhead. Connections will also be encrypted by default, just like with SPDY.
"Our next step is to test the pros and cons of the QUIC design in the real world by experimenting with using QUIC for a small percentage of Chrome dev and canary channel traffic to some Google servers, just as we did with SPDY," the company announced.
"Users shouldn't notice any difference--except hopefully a faster load time. If we're able to identify clear performance wins, our hope is to collaborate with the rest of the community to develop the features and techniques of QUIC into network standards," it added.