Nice, but a bit worrysome. Is such binary protocol a Good Thing?<p>Ancient people — even though they hadn't much CPU, memory and network resources — in all their wisdom made high-level protocols text-oriented. Sure, they didn't consider everything (so we're still haunted with evil spirits of, for example, UTF-7 and quoted-printable), but overall design was simple yet perfectly functional. And anyone could use just a telnet client to talk to HTTP (FTP, SMTP, etc) server. With SPDY you can't do such thing anymore, you need specialized software.<p>I'm all for something like "Upgrade: SPDY"/"HTTP/1.1 101 Switching Protocols" (then binary framed message-oriented protocol goes into effect), but I somehow worried with binary-from-the-beginnig "HTTP 2.0". Maybe I'm just too conservative?<p>(Side question: If we want multiplexing streams so badly, why noone cares about SCTP? Is it flawed or inappropriate?)
I don't like SPDY. It's trying to solve a transport problem at the application level. Plus it seems to be quite complex.<p>I'd love to see Google promote a transport protocol like SCTP[1], and do HTTP over SCTP instead. If Google pushed SCTP a little bit, we might see it pop on Linux and Windows within a few years.<p>[1]:<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro...</a>
Whoa, so Google Chrome is now talking SPDY to www.google.com ? I had no idea.<p>Anyone know a good way of running a packet sniffer on OS X so I can see it in action?
The author is wrong about his HTTP history.<p>Keep-alive was a feature of HTTP/1.0 and was phased out in HTTP/1.1 in favour of "persistent connections."
Does anyone know of plans to build this into Firefox? Sounds like an interesting project.<p>Edit: already found it
<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=spdy" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=spdy</a>
great thing is that Google has enough gravitational mass to move world in such direction without many years delay of negotiations inside protocol specification committee.<p>Once everybody is onboard, when the license fee will be requested?
The title seems to imply HTTP 1.1 is already dead/abondoned, when in fact almost <i>nobody</i> except Google is supporting SPDY.<p>Firefox doesn't support it, but if it's open enough there's a chance they might add support for it. MSIE support is far away and I wouldn't but any bets on it being supported any time this year. If SPDY is supposed to be more than a http-option (i.e. "beyond http 1.1") all clients need to support it. That's far from the case today.<p>Given that last time I heard about it was quite some time ago and little has changed, I would say a better title would be "Http-times: SPDY is still around, still looking for friends".<p>Just because it comes out of Google's door doesn't make anything a guaranteed success and I outside HN's usual Google-praising sphere I haven't ever heard a single geek mention it. I'm not saying it's dead either, but at this point it seems to have gathered very little interest and momentum.