Jumat, 06 Juli 2012

Opera Labs Build Adds Support for SPDY


It seems like Opera is getting with the program and has started working on its own implementation of the SPDY protocol. It's only available in a Labs release for now, but the aim is to have it in a production version of Opera soon.

It may be a Labs release, but Opera actually offers quite comprehensive support for both the older SPDY/2 and the new SPDY/3 draft versions of the specification.

What this means is that Opera just needs to test the implementation and polish the rough edges before building it into Opera 12 or more likely its successor.

SPDY is a Google creation, but it's well on its way to becoming standard. It's the proposed basis for the upcoming HTTP 2.0, so adding support now means browsers will be ready or at least have part of the work done by the time HTTP 2.0 is better defined and, eventually, standardized.

The goal of SPDY, as the name implies is to speed things up, namely to speed up communications at the application layer (HTTP).

One of the big improvements is multiplexing, several connections can be initiated from the same web page, enabling the browser to fetch several resources in parallel, instead of one at a time.

SPDY uses several other tricks and optimizations, compression, simplified headers and so on, to make communications more efficient. In practice, the speed-up can be quite impressive, though it is very dependent on how limited a page is by HTTP in the first place. SPDY is by no means a universal solution to slowness.

"The good news is that we've been hard at work implementing SPDY support in Opera, so the big red O can also take advantage of these performance increases! Other advantages include better compatibility with all Google services (and other sites and applications that employ SPDY), and allowing developers to test their own SPDY based services with Opera," Opera said in its announcement.

Opera's implementation is quite complete. It's only missing a few components, PUSH and HINT, Alternate-Protocol header, and persistent SETTINGS values. Either not all of these features are used in the wild or no other browser has implemented them.

Via: Opera Labs Build Adds Support for SPDY

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