spdy

Google's SPDY accelerator gets new wind in its sails

Has a slow Web been getting you down lately?

Just imagine if your multibillion-dollar business depended on it, as Google's does. Then imagine the glee in Google's corridors at a significant new victory in the company's attempt to build a Web-accelerating technology it calls SPDY into the Internet.

Earlier today, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group, announced support for SPDY in an overhaul of one of the networking foundations of the World Wide Web. That foundation is HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and Google hopes SPDY will open up some of its bottlenecks.

The HTTPbis … Read more

What's coming in Firefox 11

Big changes are arriving in the developer's build of Firefox for Android in a bid to make it more appealing, while the significantly more popular desktop version is getting several noteworthy but smaller changes, the company announced at the end of 2011.

Available for download now, the first versions of Firefox 11 Aurora for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android came out just after the stable build of the browser updated to version 9. The Android update is again the more notable release, as the new native Android interface reaches a wider audience. For the first time, the browser also … Read more

Google to speed up, host customers' Web sites

Google, banging its make-the-Web-faster drum again, announced a new service today to rewrite and host others' Web pages so browsers can load them faster.

But this time, the service isn't free.

The company's earlier moves in this area haven't cost a cent, but Google will charge for the new Page Speed Service when it arrives for the masses at some undefined time in the future. In the past Google used the argument that a faster Web leads to more activity and, ultimately, more ad revenue for Google, but with Page Speed Service, Google is going the old-fashioned … Read more

SPDY takes a step beyond Google's walls

SPDY, a would-be standard with which Google hopes to speed up the Web, has taken a baby step outside its founding company's walls.

Strangeloop Networks, a Vancouver company that sells technology and services for hosting content on the Web, now includes SPDY in its products, the company announced yesterday.

SPDY is basically a new and improved HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), the standard that Web browsers and Web servers use to communicate. To develop and test such a technology, a company needs to control both ends of a communication channel, and that's just what Google has done. Google's … Read more

Google's SPDY protocol could ramp up Web speeds

As part of its continual push to speed up the Web, Google is taking a look at one of the most basic connections: the conversation between Web servers and browsers.

For almost forever, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) has been the standard that allows Web servers and computer browsers to understand each other, transforming the bits and bytes served up from a Web publisher into a Web page in your browser. But Google announced Thursday that it's working on project called SPDY (pronounced, of course, "speedy") that it feels could make everything faster than HTTP currently allows.

"… Read more