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HTTP Speed+Mobility

Experimental network protocol

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated April 11, 2021

HTTP Speed+Mobility was an experimental open-specification communication protocol developed primarily at Microsoft for transporting web content. HTTP Speed+Mobility was similar to HTTP, with particular goals to reduce web page load latency and improve web security. As a revision of Google's SPDY protocol, Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility protocol achieved reduced latency through SPDY's use of compression, multiplexing, and prioritization.

01Relation to HTTP

HTTP Speed+Mobility,being built on SPDY does not replace HTTP. Rather, it modifies the way HTTP requests and responses are sent over the wire; this means that all the existing server-side applications can be used without modification if a SPDY-compatible translation layer is put in place. When sent over SPDY, the HTTP requests are processed, tokenized, simplified and compressed. For example, each SPDY end-point keeps track of which headers have been sent in the past requests and can avoid resending the headers that have not changed; those that must be sent are sent compressed.

In developing HTTP Speed+Mobility, Microsoft built upon both Google's proven SPDY protocol and on WebSocket, which is a web technology providing for bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels over a single TCP connection.

Besides support of the framing of WebSockets, changes from SPDY include the following: taking mobile phones and other low-power devices into account and the removal of SPDY’s obligatory use of CPU-intensive features , encryption, compression, and server-side push.

The IETF working group for HTTPbis has begun working on HTTP/2 and chose SPDY as the starting point.

Watch videos about HTTP Speed+MobilityExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “HTTP Speed+Mobility”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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SPDY

SPDY is an obsolete open-specification communication protocol developed for transporting web content. SPDY became the basis for HTTP/2 specification.

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