Google to dump SPDY protocol for HTTP/2

Support for SPDY protocol to be phased out in early 2016 in favour of HTTP/2, says Google

Google is to discontinue support for its SPDY open networking protocol in its Chrome browser early next year in favour of the more standard HTTP/2.

Google's Chris Bentzel, whose official job title is "multiplexing manager", and Bence Béky, HTTP/2 enabler, announced the shift in a blog post on Monday that Google will be standardising on HTTP/2 in future.

"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 standardisation. We plan to gradually roll out support for HTTP/2 in Chrome 40 in the upcoming weeks," they wrote.

They continued: "HTTP/2's primary changes from HTTP/1.1 focus on improved performance. Some key features such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritisation 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 favour of ALPN in Chrome at the same time. Server developers are strongly encouraged to move to HTTP/2 and ALPN."

Pronounced "speedy", SPDY was developed at Google and intended to be an open networking protocol for web content. Announced in 2009, it manipulates HTTP traffic using compression, multiplexing and prioritisation with the aim of improving performance. However, while implementations of SPDY were incorporated into Chromium, Firefox, Opera, Amazon Silk, Internet Explorer and Safari, it was primarily only used and developed by Google.

HTTP/2, meanwhile, is the latest iteration of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is developed under the auspices of the Internet Engineering TaskForce (IETF). It is intended to improve web performance using many of the same techniques of SPDY. Indeed, it was the development of SPDY that provided added impetus to the IETF to develop HTTP 2.0, which was later renamed HTTP/2.