Facebook Vows to Speed Web With Tech From … Google

In a rare case of agreement between the two internet giants, Facebook has announced that it’s adopting the new protocol Google developed to speed the delivery of webpages across the net.

On Sunday, as first reported by CNET, Facebook engineering manager Doug Beaver announced on a public mailing list that Facebook is moving to SPDY, a tweak to the web’s underlying HTTP protocol designed to significantly grease the transfer of data.

In addition to Google and Facebook, Twitter has adopted the protocol on its web services, and it’s now built into Google’s own Chrome web browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. In order to use the protocol, you need software on both the servers delivering the content and the browser receiving it.

SPDY is one of three protocols vying to improve good ol’ HTTP. In March, Microsoft proposed HTTP Speedy+Mobility, which Redmond designed with mobile devices in mind, and an independent developer named Willy Tarreau has offered up a third proposal dubbed Network-Friendly HTTP Upgrade.

With Facebook putting its weight behind SPDY, Google’s offering certainly has the upper hand. “We at Facebook are enthusiastic about the potential for an HTTP/2.0 standard that will deliver enhanced speed and safety for Web users,” Facebook’s Beaver writes.

“Of the three proposals, we believe it is the best basis for further work due to the variety of client and server implementations, its proven usage at large scale, and its full support for our HTTP 2.0 criteria.” That criteria does call for encryption, and Beaver points out that browsers such as Chrome currently provide encryption in tandem with SPDY.

Security researcher Chris Soghoian says he doesn’t care what HTTP update the web adopts — as long as it’s encrypted. “SPDY is already built into two web browsers and it works quite well,” he says. “It certainly made it easier for Google to turn on [encryption] for search. In this age of sniffing web browsers in coffee shops we need things that are making people more secure.”

But SPDY’s main aim is, well, speed. SPDY doesn’t exactly replace HTTP. It makes a few changes but also augments what’s already there. It compresses network packet headers, but it also provides what’s called “multiplexing,” where data from different sources can move concurrently over one connection.

Akami — whose content delivery network lets businesses speed their web services by keeping oft-used contents on servers close to users — says that SPDY has boosted can improve its performance by up to twenty percent. And anyone who uses the CDN can benefit from this.

“When they do implement SPDY, application developers like Urban Dictionary won’t have to do anything special to turn it on,” Aaron Peckham, founder and CEO of Urban Dictionary, tells Wired. “Sounds good to me.”

Source : wired.com