Categories
Security Web Development

Google Giving Preference To SSL

Looks like I beat this one by a few months. SSL is now a ranking signal for Google. I switched this and a few other sites over to SSL a few months ago, while enabling SPDY and a few other things I’m playing around with. So far this has been pretty painless and actually simplified a few things. Doing this at scale with legacy infrastructure and 3rd parties however is a whole different ballgame. It will take a while for this switch to happen for bigger players not already on board.

Categories
Security

Facebook Going HTTPS

Apparently HTTPS is going to be standard for all Facebook users:

As announced last year, we are moving to HTTPS for all users. This week, we’re starting to roll out HTTPS for all North America users and will be soon rolling out to the rest of the world.

Great move, I’m glad they are finally getting to that point. Performance should improve over time as it appears they are on board with SPDY. I think that this will benefit them in the long run. Users win the day it rolls out.

Categories
Google Mozilla Web Development

Full SPDY Ahead

For those not keeping score, Twitter, and Facebook have both come out publicly in favor of SPDY. Twitter is already using it in production. It sounds like Facebook will be soon. Mozilla implemented it in Firefox. Opera has SPDY. Google, the author of SPDY is using it in production.

This leaves Microsoft and Apple as the holdouts. Microsoft’s HTTP + Mobility is SPDY at it’s core. Microsoft hasn’t started supporting SPDY in any products, but it seems inevitable at some point. They are a holdout in implementation but not opposed to SPDY it seems.

Apple is the last major holdout. SPDY hasn’t been announced for iOS 6 or Mac OS X 10.8. As far as I’m aware Apple hasn’t made any statement suggesting support or opposition to SPDY. However I can’t see why they would oppose it. There’s nothing for them to disapprove of, other than it’s not using their IP. I’d be surprised if they don’t want to implement it.

However given SPDY is a rather backwards compatible thing to support, I don’t see this holding back adoption. Nginx is adding support for SPDY (thanks to WordPress creator Automattic), and Google is working on mod_spdy for Apache. That makes adoption for lots of large websites possible.

While the details of SPDY and the direction it will go are still in flux, it seems nearly certain that SPDY is the future of the web. Time to start digging into how to adopt it and ease the transition. The primary concerns I see are as follow:

  1. TLS Required – While not explicitly required, SPDY essentially builds on TLS and virtually any real world application needs it. This means purchasing SSL certificates for any website you wish to use SPDY with. Some have argued performance and scalability, but Google, Facebook and Twitter use SSL extensively on commodity hardware.
  2. IP Address – Unless you use Server Name Indication (SNI), which almost no websites do because of compatibility, you need an IP address for every hostname that you use TLS with. That means until IPv6 is widely adopted, it will be putting further strain on the remaining IPv4 pool.

Both of the above concerns increase complexity and cost of building websites at scale and for those who are on a very tight budget (the rest of us will manage). Because of this, I don’t think we’ll see a 100% SPDY or HTTP 2.0 web for quite some time. Don’t expect SPDY for shared hosting sites anytime soon.

In a world of increasing surveillance and user data being integrated into everything, the benefits of TLS will be realized. Both Facebook and Twitter acknowledge it’s importance in preventing user data from getting into the wrong hands.

I, For One, Welcome Our New SPDY overlord.

Categories
Apple Internet

SPDY For iOS

It has come to my attention that work is being done (3rd party) to bring SPDY to iOS. Awesome!

However, I can’t help but think that Apple is already working to bring SPDY to iOS perhaps as soon as iOS 6. I say this simply because it would bring a speed improvement without involving more Tx/Rx or upping CPU power consumption. It just improves network utilization. In fact since it improves utilization it possibly could improve battery life by reducing the radio usage.

I’d also like to see the Nitro JavaScript engine available outside of Safari so UIWebView implementations could take advantage. Supposedly that’s a WebKit2 thing, but I’ve heard/seen little of WebKit2. I suspect SPDY will happen first.

Categories
Google Networking

Google Wants To Make TCP Faster

Google has been pushing SPDY for a little while now, and so far I haven’t really seen a good argument against SPDY. Firefox 11 will ship with it, though disabled by default until the bugs are worked out. Now Google is turning its eyes towards TCP. Very logical.

While there are a variety of proposals to speed up TCP floating around, I wonder if Google would be better off just buying FastSoft for Fast TCP and pulling a VP8 style opening up. The reason being that it’s already in use on the web, Google could capitalize on that overnight. There are several TCP congestion algorithms out there, however Fast TCP seems to have the most established customer base, including CDN Limelight who uses it to upload to them.