Firefox 13 Beta Turns On the ‘SPDY’

http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/04/latest-firefox-beta-turns-on-the-spdy/

by Kenan • 14 years ago

69 24 14 years ago

webmonkey.com

aluhut• 14 years ago

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

icebraining• 14 years ago

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

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

What exactly do you want taken out? I think if you hop back to when FF was truly slim (say, v1.5) you'll discover the Good Ol' Days(tm) weren't quite as rosy as you thought.

HeXetic2• 14 years ago

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?

HeXetic2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

goatforce5• 14 years ago

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?

wmf3• 14 years ago

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".

modeless2• 14 years ago

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.

cosmotron• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

amix• 14 years ago

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

justauser2• 14 years ago

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...

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• 14 years ago

That proposal has a pile of problems: http://www.belshe.com/2012/03/29/comments-on-microsofts-spdy...

justauser2• 14 years ago

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

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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...

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

vetinari• 14 years ago

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

Firefox 13 Beta Turns On the ‘SPDY’

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