Google has a bit of a thing about speed. After releasing Chrome - probably the fastest browser around, if a little bare-bones - and minimizing page load times for its search engine, Google has now announced a research project called SPDY (and pronounced "speedy") that it hopes will further double the speed of getting around the Web.

SPDY is, in layman's terms, a way of getting browsers and the servers that deliver websites to talk to each other faster. Or, as Google says in less simple terms: "SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression".

At the moment, browsers and web servers use HTTP to chat. HTTP arrived in 1996 as a standard, and since then has served as the foundation of the Internet. But Google's now looking at new, faster, ways of that chat occurring, and has built a web server and Chrome client that supports the SPDY protocol.

A pair of Google's software engineers, Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon, say that in lab conditions the top 25 websites loaded up to 55% faster when accessed over simulated home network conditions. However, performance in real-world conditions hasn't yet been investigated.

If you want to take a peek at what the team's been up  to, then you can check out the documentation and code for the project. If you're not feeling up to sifting through browser protocols, then sit back and await what Google reckons could become a significant turbo boost for the Web.

Via: blog.chromium.org

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