

Firefox 13 Beta Turns On the ‘SPDY’ - Kenan
http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/04/latest-firefox-beta-turns-on-the-spdy/

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amix
The team behind nginx plan to roll out SPDY support at the end of May [1].
Will align nice with Firefox's support for SPDY!

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/nginxorg/status/192301063934705665>

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justauser
Microsoft has submitted a proposal that is interesting for a few reasons. The
requirement for encryption is optional and also the API/framing is closer to
Websockets.

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-montenegro-httpbis-speed-
mo...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-montenegro-httpbis-speed-mobility-01)

If encryption is required, I can see many complaining about the burden of
certificates. Will this finally drive an alternate solution such as Moxie
Marlinspike's Convergence project to help us do away with the certificate
authorities? Also, I can see a huge increase in the number of IP addresses
unless some serious progress is made with SNI. On the otherhand, that might
finally open the floodgates for widespread IPv6 adoption.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That proposal has a pile of problems:
[http://www.belshe.com/2012/03/29/comments-on-microsofts-
spdy...](http://www.belshe.com/2012/03/29/comments-on-microsofts-spdy-
proposal/)

~~~
justauser
Yes it does. As does the original proposal and I mentioned some issues in my
post.

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cosmotron
The Tabs-on-demand feature that the article mentions... isn't that the "don't
load tabs until selected" feature that has been around since FF9?

~~~
zobzu
nah it will load tabs that you open in the background without that option,
even in FF13 but if you restart the browser, it won't, ONLY for the tabs it
restores at startup.

Means basically if you open a tab via click or contextual menu and u don't
have "only load tabs when selected" it WILL load the tab. But when you restart
the browser (or start) with your 100tabs, it will only load the first one.
Before that itd both be slow if you had a bad connection and be slow
(obviously no browser can instant-render 100 pages)

~~~
terhechte
I'm currently downloading FF13 only because of that feature. I always have
100+ tabs open, and oftentimes, when a browser is "full" (i.e., too many tabs)
I switch to another browser until I have time to clean up the mess. There were
situations where Chrome, Safari, and Opera were "full". Really looking forward
to this new feature.

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goatforce5
I'm a little unclear on how SPDY works. Is it correct that it only speeds up
HTTPS connections? Does that mean you need to redirect traffic for:

<http://example.com/>

to:

<https://example.com/>

before you know if the client has SPDY support enabled?

~~~
wmf
No. If both the browser and server support SPDY, all http: and https: URLs
will go over SPDY, and SPDY is encrypted. So even http: URLs that look
unencrypted are actually being secured "by accident".

~~~
modeless
This is not true. Only HTTPS URLs get SPDY. Perhaps you're thinking of HTTP
Strict Transport Security, which transforms HTTP URLS to HTTPS on the client.
You can see whether you're getting SPDY or not (in Chrome) at chrome://net-
internals/#events&q=type:SPDY_SESSION%20is:active

One reason for this is that proxies and other buggy/evil bit-twiddlers in the
path of your connection don't understand SPDY, so the only way to punch SPDY
through them is to use a protocol they're not allowed to meddle with.

~~~
wmf
I can't find any documentation to corroborate that. The draft 2 spec mentions
HTTP several times: "...it should be used in preference to HTTP/HTTPS. ... all
HTTP requests can "piggyback" on an existing SPDY session. ... all future http
requests to that host port pair should use the SPDY session rather than
opening a new HTTP connection." [http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-
protocol/spdy-protocol-dra...](http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-
protocol/spdy-protocol-draft2#TOC-Deployment) (Curiously, the deployment
section is completely missing from draft 3 and the IETF version.)

If Chrome does something different, I wonder why.

~~~
chc
It looks to me like it's just talking about HTTP the protocol, as in GET,
POST, etc., and saying that you can reuse a SPDY session instead of opening a
new connection — it's not saying you can use SPDY over unencrypted HTTP.

~~~
wmf
As I said, SPDY always runs over TLS. What we're debating here is whether you
can request an http: URL over a (secure) SPDY connection. I see no reason why
not and it should be faster, yet it appears that this isn't being done.

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HeXetic
Kinda crummy article to mention that SPDY is actually present in earlier
Firefox versions, but just turned off. How about telling us how we can turn it
on?

~~~
HeXetic
I looked it up: In Firefox 11 and newer, punch in about:config in the URL bar,
then find network.http.spdy.enabled and turn it on.

~~~
Dylan16807
Basically everything is in about:config, and it has a search function. I don't
think it's crummy of the article to not mention the exact details.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Shame there isn't a SPDY test site I can find. spdytest.com, by the way, does
not run over SPDY. It's a plain HTTP/HTTPS site.

~~~
deno
Google and its suite of apps all use SPDY. Works great on Firefox Aurora. Get
this extension: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-
indicato...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-indicator/)

FWIW, a screenshot: <http://static.deno.pl/pub/hn/spdy-firefox.png>

~~~
vetinari
Most of Google apps use SPDY, but for some reason, ipv6.google.com does not.

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aluhut
I would love to have an old school version. Slim and "let me design it the way
I want".

~~~
icebraining
You mean, of the browser? You could try uzbl; the core part doesn't even have
an URL bar: <http://www.uzbl.org/>

