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HTTP Intermediary Layer From Google Could Dramatically Speed Up the Web
grmoc writes "As part of the 'Let's make the web faster' initiative, we (a few engineers — including me! — at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of Web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced 'SPeeDY'), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because it's what we're familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY. Thats not bad! We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we've open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results."
And all other "add this piece of Javascript to your Web page and make it more awesomer!"
Yes, yes, they're useful. And you can't fathom a future without them. But in the meantime I'm watching my status bar say, "completed 4 of 5 items", then change to "completed 11 of 27 items", to "completed 18 of 57 items", to "completed... oh screw this, you're downloading the whole Internet, just sit back, relax and watch the blinkenlights".
Remember when a 768kbps DSL line was whizzo fast? Because all it had to download was some simple HTML, maybe some gifs?
I want my old Internet back. And a pony.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
People take their slashdot comments way too seriously. Mod me whatever, it means nothing and I'll move on.