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It is always risky to build a service based on something that is not yet standardized. SPDY was in progress to be standardized, but the process ended up with pa
by azakai 12y ago
It is always risky to build a service based on something that is not yet standardized. SPDY was in progress to be standardized, but the process ended up with parts of it in HTTP2, making SPDY unnecessary, as I understand things.
It would be the right thing for Google to remove SPDY at this point, otherwise it would be running a nonstandard protocol that other browsers do not, which can lead to fragmentation - as we saw just recently with an API that sadly Google has not removed despite it being nonstandard (FileSystem in the WhatsApp "Web" app).
edit: To clarify, I mean what Google is doing with SPDY sounds like the right thing. I don't mean it should remove it right now, I meant it was the right thing to do, right now, to announce it would be removed after a reasonable delay (and 1 year sounds reasonable).
- dragonwriter 12y ago> SPDY was in progress to be standardized, but the process ended up with parts of it in HTTP2, making SPDY unnecessary, as I understand things. The "progress to be standardized" for SPDY was SPDY being chosen as the basis for HTTP/2; as I understand for a while SPDY has been being updated in parallel to the HTTP/2 development work to continue to reflect the state of HTTP/2 + new things the Google SPDY team wants to get into the standard, but its been clear for a long time that the intent was that SPDY as a separate protocol would be unnecessary once HTTP/2 was ready for use.
- kozhevnikov 12y agoTo be fair Google did happily kill Gears when HTML5 became a viable [early draft] standard.
- azakai 12y agoAgreed, Google did the right thing to remove Gears. My concern is because, overall, Google has a bad track record in this area: FileSystem is still enabled, WebSQL is still enabled, PNaCl is still enabled edit: and H.264 was never removed despite announcing the intent to do so.
- pcwalton 12y agoNot to mention not removing H.264 after promising to do so.
- azakai 12y agoThanks, right, I forgot that one.
- hammerandtongs 12y agowebsql is so much nicer then the key/val firefox insisted on :(
- thristian 12y agoWebSQL is nicer to use, but requiring every browser to be bug-for-bug compatible with SQLite 3.0.17 (or whatever it was) forever and ever is not nice for browser developers.
- kllrnohj 12y ago> PNaCl is still enabled Eh? What is the spec competitor to PNaCl? asm.js is a cute trick but it still lacks threads which is easily one of the biggest features of PNaCl. So what actual viable alternatives are there to PNaCl?
- azakai 12y agoWe can discuss alternatives to PNaCl, but that isn't really the issue. Even if you have something you believe has no peer at the moment, that doesn't mean you can ship it without regards for the the standards process. It's still wrong for all the usual reasons. Of course, not having a good alternative might mean that the other parties in the standards process should take another look at it. But again, that's a totally separate issue from whether it is ok to just ignore the standards process and ship whatever you want, which is what Google is doing here.
- 12y ago
- andrewd18 12y ago> It would be the right thing for Google to remove SPDY at this point It's going away, just maybe not soon enough for everyone's tastes. From the blog: > We plan to remove support for SPDY in early 2016
- azakai 12y agoI think that's a reasonable timeline, actually - sorry if what I wrote was confusing to imply "right now". I meant to say "It would be the right thing for Google to announce the timeline to remove SPDY at this point in time." A year head's up gives people plenty of time to update their sites, and sounds fair and reasonable.