Mozilla is taking a page from Google’s Chrome development and is gearing up to implement a new protocol to help accelerate the Firefox web browser. The open source Firefox 11 browser, which is now in beta, will include the SPDY protocol. The current stable release of Firefox is version 10, which was released last week.
SPDY is a web protocol first introduced by Google in November of 2009. SPDY, pronounced ‘Speedy’, is all about making the web faster by helping to reduce page load speeds. SPDY is a TCP optimization technology that accelerates page loads by using fewer TCP connections.
“Many web pages are full of small icons and script references,” Mozilla developer Patrick McManus wrote in a blog post. “The speed of those transfers is limited by network delay instead of bandwidth. SPDY ramps up the parallelism, which in turn removes the serialized delays experienced by HTTP/1 and the end result is faster page load time.”
Mozilla’s decision to finally embrace SPDY was applauded by Google developer Matt Cutts who simply tweeted, “Really nice to see Firefox adding SPDY support.
Read the full story at Datamation:
Firefox 11 Gets SPDY
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist