Tag: SPDY

Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY

Chromium blog reports that by the early next year, Chromium (and Chrome) will phase out the support for SPDY and NPN in favor of HTTP/2 and ALPN.

HTTP is the fundamental networking protocol that powers the web. The majority of sites use version 1.1 of HTTP, which was defined in 1999 with RFC2616. A lot has changed on the web since then, and a new version of the protocol named HTTP/2 is well on the road to standardization. We plan to gradually roll out support for HTTP/2 in Chrome 40 in the upcoming weeks.

HTTP/2’s primary changes from HTTP/1.1 focus on improved performance. Some key features such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY. Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it’s time to say goodbye. We plan to remove support for SPDY in early 2016, and to also remove support for the TLS extension named NPN in favor of ALPN in Chrome at the same time. Server developers are strongly encouraged to move to HTTP/2 and ALPN.

http2 explained

http2 explained – This document describes http2 at a technical and protocol level. Background, the protocol, the implementations and the future.

Some highlights:

  • The http2 spec is expected to ship in June 2014 (a month or two away!)
  • http2 is heavily based on Google’s SPDY
  • http2 is binary
  • http2 fixes a lot of issues with HTTP 1.1 (pipelining, head of line blocking, etc)
  • http2 brings new features (server push, block, reset)
  • http2 will keep the URL schemes (http and https)
  • http2 will mostly be implemented for https (via protocol negotiations in TLS)
  • http2 already has a variety of implementations: Firefox and Google Chrome (MSIE coming), cURL, Goolge, Twitter, Facebook.  Apache and Nginx expected.