14 DAY TRIAL // After an unwanted delay, SPDY support is finally moving forward in Firefox. The latest Firefox 11 Beta includes support for the updated HTTP developed by Google and already supported by several sites, including most Google sites.
SPDY, as the name suggests aims to improve the performance of websites by optimizing HTTP in several crucial areas. The results are faster responding and loading pages.
"The most important goal of SPDY is to transport web content using fewer TCP connections. It does this by multiplexing large numbers of transactions onto one TLS connection," Mozilla explained.
"This has much better latency properties than native HTTP/1. When using SPDY a web request practically never has to wait in the browser due to connection limits being exhausted (e.g. the limit of 6 parallel HTTP/1 connections to the same host name). The request is simply multiplexed onto an existing connection," it added.
SPDY has been several years in the making. It is already mature enough for wide use, yet most websites and hosts haven't deployed it for a simple reason, lack of browser support.
Google Chrome has had support for it for over a year, but it has been the only major browser to do so.
As a result, few websites outside of Google have adopted it. Amazon uses it in the Silk browser for its Kindle Fire tablet to speed up connections between the browser and the Amazon cloud.
SPDY improves page loading speed and responsiveness by enabling the browser to request all of a page's resources in parallel. Bandwidth is rarely a problem in today's internet, but network congestion is.
Another way SPDY improves the web is with real-time protocols and applications. Things like WebRTC, VoIP communication or online games will all benefit from the lower latency.
SPDY is included in Firefox 11, but it is not enabled by default. If you want to test it out, go to about:config search for "network.http.spdy.enabled" and set it to "true."