Google Chrome Going Ahead With Removing SPDY In Favor Of HTTP/2

In a Chromium blog post today, Google is saying goodbye to the SPDY protocol in favor of HTTP/2.

Google has long been behind the SPDY networking protocol as a faster alternative to HTTP 1.1. With the HTTP/2 draft standard being based on SPDY, Google is preparing to sunset the SPDY protocol support within the Chrome/Chromium web-browser.

The Chromium blog post today says that support for SPDY will be removed in early 2016 and they'll also remove support for the NPN TLS extension in favor of ALPN. As such, Google is announcing these planned changes now to encourage server developers to move on with their migration to HTTP/2 and ALPN.

HTTP/2 is already supported too by Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other web browsers too with the focus on this next-generation HTTP protocol based on SPDY to offer better performance and lower latencies, a high-level of compatibility with HTTP 1.1, and support for new use-cases. While HTTP/2 is a big step forward for HTTP and has wide industry backing, not everyone is happy. HTTP/2 in the near-final RFC form is expected to be published soon.