Tag Archives: SPDY

HttpWatch 8.5 Supports Firefox 15 and SPDY Version 3

September 3, 2012

HttpWatch has been updated to support Firefox 15 and add some new features: Supports SPDY Version 3 New SPDY Version column Improved handling of images with transparency High DPI Awareness for Windows 7 SPDY Version 3 is an updated version of the SPDY protocol and includes some performance related changes such as improved header compression. These changes have been included in Firefox 15 but are not enabled by default. To try out SPDY version 3 you need to enable the network.http.spdy.enabled.v3 setting in about:config: There’s also a new SPDY Version column that you can add in HttpWatch 8.5 to show which version … Continue reading →

SPDY Content Compression – How Should it Work?

June 7, 2012

One of the first things we noticed when using HttpWatch in Firefox 13 was that Google servers do not compress content in SPDY responses: HTTP compression is usually the most important optimization technique a site can use because it drastically reduces the download size of textual resources such as HTML. It therefore seems surprising that the Google servers do not use it with SPDY responses to Firefox. In fact, the Google home page tries to determine if the browser supports compression by downloading a gzip compressed javascript file to see if it executes. You can see the compression test URL highlighted in … Continue reading →

HttpWatch 8.3 Supports SPDY

June 5, 2012

Mozilla Firefox 13 was released today and includes a significant performance related feature. By default, it now uses the SPDY protocol with any supporting web site. The SPDY protocol was developed as part of Google’s ‘Lets make the web faster’ initiative to overcome these performance related problems in HTTP: Only a single HTTP request can be active on an HTTP connection at a given time. Although HTTP pipelining was intended to overcome this, it still uses a FIFO queue and it is not well supported by existing HTTP infrastructure. Headers in HTTP request and responses messages are never compressed. Item 1) is … Continue reading →