Chrome Will Drop SPDY Support On May 15

With SPDY, Google laid much of the groundwork for what later become HTTP/2, the next-gen version of the HTTP protocol that is responsible for sending websites to your browser. Now that HTTP/2 is an official standard, Google is getting ready to deprecate support for SPDY in its Chrome browser and as the company today announced, starting May 15, Chrome will no longer support SPDY.

That doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that Google already announced it would start fading out SPDY support in favor of HTTP/2 a year ago. For the first time, though, we now have a date for when Chrome will officially stop supporting SPDY.

So if you’re running a server that currently supports SPDY but not HTTP/2, it’s probably time to make the switch.

Google says 25 percent of the resources in Chrome now arrive over HTTP/2 connections and only 5 percent over SPDY. Chances are, Google waited for SPDY to drop to 5 percent to announce this switch.

The Chrome team also today announced that Chrome will stop supporting the TLS protocol extension NPN on May 15. NPN (the ‘Next Protocol Negotiation’ extension) allows the server and browser to negotiate which protocol to use. It has now been superseded by the ALPN (Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation) extension.

For users, this switch likely won’t result in any obvious changes. Both HTTP/2 and SPDY allow for faster and more efficient connections between browsers and servers. HTTP/2 is partly based on SPDY and includes a number of additional optimizations, so if anything, your connections will be even faster now.