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Comment by 0xABADC0DA | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Speed+Mobility proposal is actually much better than Spdy:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-montenegro-httpbis-speed-mo...

They took Spdy and dropped priorities, settings and other ill-conceived parts from it and made compression and encryption optional. There's still some Spdy warts in the HTTP parts of it though...

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One of the reasons SPDY uses encryption is to ensure intermediate proxies do not mishandle the new protocol. A couple of SDPY devs gave a tech talk[1] where they mentioned the problems with tunneling a new protocol (in their example websockets) through HTTP (19:11 into video). Sending websockets over HTTP on port 80 only has a 67% success rate. HTTPS over 443 had a 95% success rate. The benefit of HTTPS is that intermediates cannot see or interfere with data transfer. The disadvantage is that caching and CDNs are more difficult to use.

As an interesting side note, tunneling HTTP over a random port (in the slides port 61985) had a higher success rate than port 80 (86% vs 67%). If I remember correctly, the speakers attribute this to intermediate proxies hardcoded to handle port 80, leaving other ports free of processing.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNBkxA313kk

I don't have much opinion either way. However, always-on encryption and compression is one of the best bits about SPDY.

One of the creator of SPDY's responses to that proposal.

http://www.belshe.com/2012/03/29/comments-on-microsofts-spdy...

They took Spdy and dropped priorities, settings and other ill-conceived parts from it and made compression and encryption optional.

So they prioritized different things. That doesn't make it much better.

As an aside, where is the Microsoft reference implementation of Speed+Mobility? Where is their browser support for it? This, like so many Microsoft initiatives, seems primarily intended to delay and divert an initiative to make the web better.

"just roll it out and make everyone do what we did" is precisely the mechanism that has saddled us with innumerable busted protocols and bizarre implementation artifacts.

Then again, hard to argue that strategy is all bad. We have the internet as it is today, which while perhaps not ideal, is quite a thing.

Yep! Any day now the beautifully designed X.25 protocol[1] will replace TCP, just like OSI[2] predicted.

Rough Consensus and Working Code[3] built the internet, and it seems to work well enough to be useful.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Systems_Interconnection

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_consensus

You appear to have reached a very different conclusion than I.

It is also a way to essentially put your money where your mouth is, aligning interests and ensuring that you really believe what you're saying. Pushing out specs is a little too easy to simply delay others from doing anything.

Further implementations can be credibly compared and considered. Many "HTML 5" features came via Google Gears, and would have taken a decade the traditional paper route.

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