It seems that in their spare time between reinventing the browser, mobile phone and book storage, the guys at Google are also looking at changing web protocols as well.  spdy:// is their proposed replacement to http://, a protocol designed to speed up transfers of large web pages with a lot of content.  They argue the current protocol generates a request of a kilobyte or more, slowing down connections while their usage of SSL encryption and gzip compression trims that down and gives up to a 50% speed increase.  The downside is the pressure put on the web server at the other end as a lot of the request is processed on the server side. As well, Ars Technica points out the required SSL connection is not likely to prompt more sites to keep a current security certificate; it is more likely to cause certificate warnings to be ignored more than they are already.

“On the Chromium blog, Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon write about an early-stage research project called SPDY (“speedy”). Unhappy with the performance of the venerable hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), researchers at Google think they can do better.”

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