
Your Chrome browser might not be using HTTP anymore - tsycho
http://www.igvita.com/2011/04/07/life-beyond-http-11-googles-spdy
======
tiles
The transparency with which Chrome did this was actually a problem for me.
Google Docs/GMail did not work for months on my school's ethernet connection
until I read about SPDY being implemented; sure enough, launching Chrome with
SPDY disabled fixed the issue, and that requires a command line option. I wish
Chrome were less transparent about this and added a few Preferences options,
at least.

~~~
tyler
I don't mean to be pedantic, but the word "transparent", in this context,
means "easily perceived or detected". I believe you're using it to mean the
opposite.

~~~
jmillikin

      > the word "transparent", in this context, means "easily perceived or detected"
    

This definition doesn't make much sense to me. Transparent objects are less
easily perceived/detected than opaque objects. In technology, transparent
proxies/compression/encryption are designed to have little/no impact on their
contained data.

~~~
BCM43
I think this word uses the assumption that between you and them is an object.
If the object is transparent, you can see what they are doing. If it is not,
and it is a cloak of some sort, you cannot see what they are doing.

------
Erwin
You can peek into your Chrome'ss current SPDY connections (and other
interesting internals) in their internal pages:

chrome://net-internals/#events&q=type:SPDY_SESSION%20is:active

------
strictfp
Really annoying that they didn't just use SCTP. One commenter on the page
points out that it works on top of TCP, which is supported by most routers.
This, however, is an entirely artificial limitation. It is a sad fact that
this type of artificial restrictions are imposed, and i say that we should
fight against them. Having all inet services running over port 80 and TCP does
not make the net any safer or better. We as hackers should fight for making
people aware of and remove such restrictions, not accept and worsen the
crippled situation by working around the problem. This is one of the key
problems in the digital world today, too few actually makes an effort to fix
the underlying problems. Here Google could play a crucial role, and I must say
that I am dissapointed by their choice.

~~~
sipior
I'm afraid I don't understand this. SCTP is a transaction-level protocol,
whilst SPDY works at the application layer, does it not? These choices are
orthogonal, not mutually-exclusive, as near as I can tell.

~~~
wmf
HTTP over SCTP would bring many of the same advantages as HTTP over SPDY over
TCP.

~~~
sipior
Right, that was the part I did understand :-) What I didn't get was why the
parent comment was disappointed that Google didn't choose SCTP over SPDY,
since no either-or choice is required here. Couldn't SPDY be run over SCTP as
well (leaving aside the problems with SCTP that you brought up in your
previous comment), albeit with some redundant functionality?

~~~
wmf
If SPDY were designed to run (only) over SCTP, presumably the redundant
functionality wouldn't have been designed in the first place, saving Google's
time and yielding a more elegant protocol. At least that's my interpretation.

~~~
jacques_chester
Network protocols are fractal. Similar but not-quite-identical problems appear
at each layer of the stack and wind up being solved in not-quite-identical
ways.

------
kgtm
If you want to see your SPDY sessions and an abundance of other related
information, browse to _about:net-internals_ from a new Chrome tab.

------
igrigorik
For those interested in playing with SPDY, ruby parser and generator:
<https://github.com/igrigorik/spdy>

~~~
uriel
An SPDY implementation was recently added to the development version of Go's
standard library.

(Not surprising given that agl is also part of the Go team at Google.)

------
edu
It's a good improvement over HTTP 1.1 and it's nice how they did it in a
completely transparent way. Now it's time for the other browsers to support it
and to implement way to hint the usage of spdy (maybe a <link rel="" in the
first HTTP request, or an extra header in the HTTP request).

~~~
Angostura
Now it's time for the other browsers to support it

Nope, that time would be when there is an RFC

~~~
drivingmenuts
No, now is the time to make it an option, not ram it down our throats.

As developers, we need to be able to see things exactly as the people we're
developing for who do not always have the luxury of using the latest and
greatest browsers.

~~~
djroketboy
This is the piss poor attitude that kept us stuck on IE6 for 10 years...

~~~
Seldaek
This is the piss poor attitude that makes HN a better place. Not that the
other comment was the most clever thing I ever read, but please.

~~~
djroketboy
Your comment makes little sense; if my piss poor attitude makes HN a better
place than why the downvote and snide remark? What is so clever about yours?

------
ck2
<http://google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+spdy>

------
joejohnson
Does Apache support SPDY?

~~~
wmf
<http://code.google.com/p/mod-spdy/>

