The larger issue is that together with SPDY support they will also drop NPN in favour of ALPN. This means that to provide HTTP/2, server administrators will not only need a new version of Nginx (or their favourite webserver), but also OpenSSL 1.0.2.<p>The big problem with that is that currently no common server distributions provide an easy way to get OpenSSL 1.0.2. Many sites offer HTTP/2 with NPN instead of ALPN right now. Those will no longer get HTTP/2 in Chrome when SPDY and NPN are deprecated.<p>So, most web server administrators who do not want to deal with building their own OpenSSL/Nginx/... will have no choice but to drop SPDY and HTTP/2 completely, or switch to a future distro that comes with OpenSSL 1.0.2 (Ubuntu 16.04 will be the first major one in a few months).<p>The deprecation of NPN should, in my opinion, be postponed a little more. While you can easily upgrade your webserver with upstream packages, usually, switching to a different OpenSSL version is way out of scope for most administrators. Debian will have a stable release with OpenSSL 1.0.2 late 2016 or early 2017, CentOS 8 will probably take even longer. And even then, few people will just switch their server operating systems. Instead of pushing people to HTTP/2, deprecating NPN this soon will hurt adoption instead.