Disabling gzip compression isn't the only workaround to the CRIME attack. For Chromium, Adam Langley patched zlib to differentiate between various classes of data; see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=139744#c... and https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/10837057/ .

However, it's more difficult for other SPDY implementations to use the patched zlib, so this isn't an ideal solution. For SPDY/4 / HTTP/2, we will have a custom header compressor which is intended to eliminate CRIME-like attacks: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-header-compre... .

(Disclaimer: I work on SPDY / HTTP/2 for Chromium.)