A QUIC update on Google’s experimental transport
blog.chromium.org
blog.chromium.org
I previously saw companies, like Sun, completely fail at this. Eg. The many Java specifications that were created by the standards bodies. Sun tried to do it right by having a reference implementation with the spec. But the Reference implementations were rarely used for real work, so it proved only that the spec could be built, not that the spec elegantly solved real problems.
I wouldn't necessarily say "innovate" or "offer," but they do understand the process. You can make pretty much anything a "standard" with a bit of money and time (isn't Microsoft Office's XML format a "standard"?), but adoption is always an issue. However, Google controls a popular web server (Google search) and client (Google Chrome), so for web-things, they can create "widespread adoption" for whatever they standardize.
Google has an advantage because there's an obvious win over the old standard and they offer a big enough buy-in. GIF, for example, is generally better served by PNG. But adoption has been slow because the benefits aren't good enough and wide support took awhile to get implemented.
Google's innovation is to make http faster over a slow unreliable network (e.g. a wireless device). They solved a real world problem, proved it using their own users and now are going to standardize. Their innovation is driving their standardization efforts.
If google didn't solve a real world problem then even with their platform they couldn't impact widespread adoption. Their innovations (SPDY and now QUIC) solve real world problems, so adoption will become widespread.
MSFT with Office XML was solving a political problem, not a real world problem. Ie. Office was taking a hit because DOC/XLS were proprietary formats, and governments were concerned about archiving documents in a proprietary format and were therefore threatening to move to open standards (ie. OSS office suites). MSFT fought back by pushing through a standard document format to offer their sales staff with a rebuttal to customers threatening to move to an open standard. Ie. The 'standard' only has traction due to MSFTs monopoly on office and serves no real benefit to anyway except for MSFTs salesforce.
The difference with Office XML is that a) there's not a clear benefit to the community as a whole to adopting the new standard, and b) they don't seem to have made any great effort to encourage their competitors to implement it.
It's really messed up that all our non-xmpp (a massive majority) messaging goes over nonstandard protocols. All our daily communications are behind walled gardens; one of the sorriest states in tech today.
Hangouts going open source is one of the few ways this could change in a reasonable time frame.
huh? Not to further derail this thread into irrelevant topics, but open up gmail in Firefox. If you aren't still holding on to the old google chat, that's hangouts right there. It takes like 2 seconds to verify this.
In other words: very unlikely.
Google says they will eventually submit this to IETF and produce a reference implementation, but it is interesting how a company was able to quietly move a large user base from open protocols to a proprietary protocol.
50% of all communication between Chrome and Google sites is now through a path that is not standardized, nor on track to standardization, and is just special to the combination of Google's browser plus Google's sites. That sets off warning lights for some people, and for good reason.
I totally get that to experiment with a new protocol, you need real-world data. Definitely. So if say 1% or 5% of that communication were non-standard, I really wouldn't have much of an issue. But when the "experimentation" is 50%, it's on the verge of being the normal path; it doesn't seem like experimentation. Perhaps they could continue the experiment and go from 50% to 60% or 80% - there isn't much a difference at that point. In fact, if the new protocol is better, it would be almost irrational not to - if 50% is considered ok ethically, and moving to 60% saves costs, then why wouldn't you?
I'm not saying that there is something wrong here. It's not even seriously worrying, given Google's positive track record on SPDY. Still, it's very close to the edge of being worrying. That worry of course is that they expand beyond 50%, and are slow to standardize or never do so - in which case things would clearly be wrong. Again, Google has a good reputation here, given SPDY. Still, I'm surprised Google feels ok to move half of all communication to a non-standard protocol, apparently unconcerned about that worrying anyone.
Right now, 50% of Chrome users (the #1 browser), on Google websites (some of the #1 websites), are in that state.
This is only Google sites visited by Chrome. It's not like you can't visit these Google sites with normal HTTP with other browsers, nor does Chrome use QUIC on the rest of the web. If they walled themselves in then I could see a cause for concern but right now, even 50% of the traffic between Google sites and Chrome is still nowhere near the majority of internet traffic in any sense.
Because the web is open and massive is precisely the reason why changes like these will not happen overnight but potentially take decades. The amount of old legacy stuff on the web including protocols, implementations, security holes, ipv4, etc that seem like they'll never get upgraded is far more worrying to me.
The logic behind it is benevolent and reasonable, but the short-term effect is that Chrome users get an incentive to use GWS/Gmail/Drive rather than Yahoo/Dropbox, and GWS/GMail/Yahoo users get an incentive to use Chrome rather than Firefox/Safari/IE.
If Chrome intentionally started rendering Yahoo slower, that would be blatantly anti-competitive. This is, in effect, just about the same thing, only with practical reasons behind it (much like their were practical reasons behind integrating IE into Windows).
This seems to be a poor analogy.
One of the main draws of capitalism is to encourage companies to compete by offering quality products. One of the main drawbacks is that companies are also able to compete by sabotaging the ability of other companies to offer quality products.
The second is the reason for anti-competitive laws. Sabotaging Yahoo falls into this category. Offering a better product that what's already on the market - especially without impeding the quality of the old product - falls squarely into the first.
> it is interesting how a company was able to quietly move a large user base from open protocols to a proprietary protocol.
Some of us may believe Google is doing so for good reasons, some of us might not be sure - but that is all beside the point.
The point is that this is a massive show of power. And it has been applied quietly - no one (outside of Google) knew about this massive change in activity until this blogpost.
In any hands, that amount of power should be worrying.
I don't think this is a cause for concern but rather a victory for progress and efficiency that a company can finally do such large scale testing and experimentation to move us all to a better standard.
No one else has a web browser with market share anywhere near.
And no other browser vendor has any major websites. Microsoft has Bing and MSN etc. sites, but those are fairly small compared to google.com, google docs, google maps, etc. etc.
Facebook would be a company with a website that has massive reach. But Facebook doesn't control a browser. If it did have a major browser, it would be as concerning as Google is.
It's the combination of major browser + major websites that allowed Google to divert a massive part of internet usage from a standard protocol to a non-standard one. No one else can do that today.
Only if you weren't paying attention. They've been discussing testing it on Google's servers like they did SPDY for a long time now. The first announcement I can find that they were switching some Google traffic over to it was almost two years ago[1], and if you're on blink-dev or chromium-dev (or proto-quic, if you're serious about it) you'd have gotten periodic updates on the topic. Youtube videos about it[2] (with discussion on HN[3]), etc etc.
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...
The distinction between open-source-but-proprietary and open-standard is important for many reasons. One of the most important is that open-source-but-proprietary protocols, if they catch on, end up devolving into bug-for-bug compatibility with a giant pile of C++.
I think there is a distinction to be made between closed spec protocols and protocols developed prior to being submitting for standardization; while its hard to tell them apart prior to the latter actually being submitted for standardization outside of potentially misleading forward-looking statements of intent, the latter is a reasonable way of cleaning up something and getting some solid real-world feedback and proving utility before submitting something as the basis for standards work while the former carries the problem you describe.
By your definition Mozilla's (your employer's) asm.js and Rust are also proprietary.
Somehow I doubt that you jump on every thread about asm.js or Rust to point out how proprietary they are or how they are implemented as a giant pile of C++. Double standards.
There have been plenty of research and work even in standard bodies like IETF that try to implement a better tcp/ip-like protocol.
They all went nowhere because at this point in time, you can't just have some guys in a room to design a new transmission protocol and have it taken seriously by anyone that matters (Google/Apple/Microsoft/Mozilla).
Google is following the only realistic route: implement something, test it in a scale large enough to conclusively show an improvement and then standardize it.
This is exactly how HTTP/2 happened.
We should be cheering them on instead of spreading FUD because it doesn't live up to your impossible standard of non-proprieterness.
I think dragonwriter's sibling comment to yours is pretty apt here. It's hard to tell the difference between something that will be submitted to standards bodies any day now and something that really will be submitted to standards bodies any day now. At a certain point (with e.g. Pepper) the statute of limitations runs out and you have to assume it's just going to be an open-source but proprietary API.
Of course, whether or not overloading "proprietary" is useful is a different discussion. Mostly it seems these conversations eventually just devolve into arguments over definitions of the word for no real insight.
asm.js isn't a new protocol, and so isn't proprietary according to that definition. It's a subset of JavaScript (to be specific, ES6, including such extensions such as Math.imul). You can implement asm.js by simply implementing the open, multi-vendor ES6 standard. In fact, that's exactly what some projects, like JavaScriptCore, are doing.
Rust isn't relevant, as it's not intended to be added to the Web. Adding <script type="text/rust"> to the browser would be a terrible idea for numerous reasons. Nobody has proposed it.
"Proprietary" as used here isn't limited to the Web.
I do think there is a big difference between "a subset of JavaScript" and "a bunch of JavaScript APIs" from a standardization point of view. All engines have been implementing special optimizations for JavaScript subsets ever since the JS performance wars started. Nobody thinks we need to standardize polymorphic inline caches, for example, even though the set of JS code that is PIC-friendly is different from the set of JS code that is heavily polymorphic (and this distinction would be easy to describe formally if anyone cared to). asm.js is just an optimization writ large: the reason why it's not a protocol is that any conforming JavaScript implementation is also an asm.js implementation.
I think people are reading a lot more into my posts than was intended. I'm not calling out QUIC specifically, since I'm not involved with the details of its standardization anyway. The point is simply that open source doesn't automatically mean non-proprietary.
Things like the "Championed" proposals model for TC39 and (as DannyBee notes) IETF's approach to standardization are direct acknowledgements of this. In a way the Extensible Web approach is also a direct acknowledgment, insofar as it says that innovation happens at the edges, so browsers should provide minimum flexible building blocks and get out of the way. asm.js is a great example of using those building blocks (though it should be noted that as asm.js catches on, other browsers are forced to spend time on it, explicit directive prologue handling or no). Network protocols, on the other hand, are something that can't be built and tested from the tools browsers provide.
I think the better question for you would be, what's the better way to develop network protocols like this, then? Assuming that purpose, I can't think of anything to criticize here except maybe they should have limited testing to beta and dev users of Chrome. However, that limits your test data and normally that sort of thing is done to make sure web compatibility isn't broken in the future by changing standards, and given that browsers already negotiate protocols, I don't see an imminent danger there.
As I mentioned in my reply to tptacek, I'm not intending to call out QUIC specifically here; the point is simply that open source and open standards are not equivalent. Shipping implementations is fine as long as there are effective safeguards to prevent lock-in.
What we have to make sure we avoid is something like the -webkit CSS prefix situation, where the fact that WebKit was open source did nothing to prevent the mobile Web from very nearly coming to depend on all the quirks of a big pile of C++. (That situation is also an example of standardization leading to better outcomes—remember how bad the WebKit-specific "-webkit-gradient(linear, color-stop(foo), ...)" syntax was?)
I love Mozilla, but this seems like an apt description of "JavaScript." (sure, they're not so much bugs as misfeatures, but..)
By the definitions of proprietary floated here, every open protocol standardized as IETF proposal started out as proprietary.
The only thing that wouldn't seems to be "stuff designed in the open by committee". A process that has worked so well, it brought us things like C++ and POSIX.
I fully agree, but it has to be counterbalanced with not shipping random single-vendor features to the entire Web. The proven model here, which is a policy shared by both Blink and Gecko, is developer and beta channels and feature flags.
> The only thing that wouldn't seems to be "stuff designed in the open by committee". A process that has worked so well, it brought us things like C++ and POSIX.
It also brought us things like CSS 2.1 (which everyone loves to hate, but it's much better than the nightmare of pre-CSS layout) and ES6 (which is extremely well-designed). Even the standard versions of C++ aren't really badly designed, especially if you limit yourself to C++{11,14}: there were a few notable standardization blunders, like the STL allocator API, but by and large it's hard to find things in C++11 and C++14 that were clearly mistakes at the time.
CORBA and XHTML 2.0 would be better examples, but the failure modes there were being unimplementable and impracticality of dropping backwards compatibility respectively, both of which the developer channel/feature flag approach address.
Is it unrelated, or is your argument that if they do it this way, it's somehow now "open" and not "proprietary"? Because if so, i struggle to see why that would be the case :)
"Even the standard versions of C++ aren't really badly designed, especially if you limit yourself to C++{11,14}: there were a few notable standardization blunders, like the STL allocator API, but by and large it's hard to find things in C++11 and C++14 that were clearly mistakes at the time."
I'm just going to go with "C++ committee members i have easy access to" (IE sit 10 feet from me) disagree :)
Now, that's not to say it's a complete and utter disaster, but ...
Absolutely. If the goal is to create a open, multi-vendor implementation of some feature, then the right way to go about it is to (a) implement it behind a feature flag; (b) present it for standardization; (c) take feedback into account during the process, making changes as necessary; (d) ship it to stable and remove the flag once consensus emerges. Even better if multiple vendors do (a) at the same time, but it's not strictly necessary.
The reason why the flag in step (a) is so important is that it makes step (c) possible. Otherwise, there's a very real risk that content will come to depend on the quirks of your first implementation, making it impossible to take other parties' feedback into account. If you just ship to stable right away, you're running the risk of making the platform depend on a proprietary feature.
The reason why doing (a) before (b) is important is that it prevents unimplementable features and mistakes that only become apparent once implementation happens from being standardized. It also allows users of the feature, not just the folks who implement the platform, to take part in the process.
This process is really the only one I know of for popular multi-vendor platforms that both prevents proprietary features from being locked in and avoids the problems of design-by-committee. That's why both Blink and Gecko have adopted it (and Blink is definitely to be commended for following it).
To some extent this might be a matter of appearance. Does Google have a firm rule against shipping a proprietary protocol to over 50% - is that why you stopped there? If so, that would be reassuring to hear.
1. proprietary vs. Free / Open Source (code released under an F/OSS license), and
2. proprietary vs. Open Standards (an implementation of a standard governed by an independent standards body and freely implementable.)
QUIC is not proprietary by F/OSS on the first axis, and currently proprietary rather than based on an open standards on the second axis, with a stated intent of becoming the basis for open standards works in the future.
There is, I think, a pretty good case that this is a good way to get to new open standards that are actually useful for solving real world problems.
Very few applications are only an implementation of an open standard, but things like the QUIC implementation or other communications protocol implementations aren't applications, but lower level components.
Anyone who wants to discuss it on the mailing list and submit code.
In fact, the project has a ton of non-google non-drive-by committers (250+ IIRC, it's been a while since i looked ).
I do admit that things aren't as cut-and-dry for protocols and specifications than for actual implementations where rights and ownership are pretty clearly defined, but surely you can see that there is a distinction that can be drawn here? QUIC is expected to become an open standard (or die), but it's not there yet. Though it may be further along on the "open" than "standard" aspect.
(Some software implements a proprietary protocol.)
So this definition of proprietary does not seem particularly useful ....
Consider:
H.264 has a spec that's written down by a standards-setting organization and not a trade secret (though behind a paywall) and has multiple independent interoperable implementations. Yet, it's "proprietary" in the sense that it's patent-encumbered. I.e. the patent holder are the proprietors.
VP8, OTOH, is Royalty Free with a Free Software canonical implementation and has other implementations, too, though their independence is debatable. Yet, VP8 is called "proprietary" by some, because the design of VP8 was under a single vendor's (Google's) control and not blessed by a standards-setting organization.
I think using the word "proprietary" as the opposite of "free as in Free Software" is fine when talking about a particular implementation, but it's better to avoid the word when talking about protocols and formats.
For protocols and formats, it's more productive to talk about:
* Royalty-free vs. encumbered
* Multiple independent interoperable implementations vs. single implementation.
* A Free Software implementation exists vs. doesn't.
* Fully specified vs. defined by a reference implementation.
* (If fully specified) Non-secret spec vs. secret spec.
* (If non-secret spec) Spec available at a freely GETtable URL vs. spec behind paywall or similar.
(A number of Googly things that are royalty-free and have a Free Software implementation go to worse end of these axes on the points of having a single implementation and being defined by the quirks of that implementation.)
If the feature is actually an improvement, it should be on for everyone that's able to run the code as soon as possible. Ship fast and break nothing.
To address a different aspect of your comment, I do think it's very interesting how little attention we pay to the packets of data sent between software running on our personal devices and remote servers. Slap some TLS on it, and nobody even notices.
I think there's a fundamental OS level feature, and a highly visible UI component which is outright missing, allowing users to understand no just what programs are connecting to where, but what are they actually sending out and receiving. If it didn't have such horrendous implications and failure modes, I would love to have highly functional deep packet MitM proxy keeping tabs on exactly what my computer is doing over the network. You know, or the NSA could publish a JSON API to access their copy?
Personally I have a much broader use case in mind for E3X than QUIC is designed for, incorporating IoT and meta-transport / end-to-end private communication channels. So, I expect they'll diverge more as they both evolve...
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...
[1] cr.yp.to/tcpip/minimalt-20130522.pdf
I wish we were having a conversation where djb had written an amazing and performant minimaLT implementation that we could prepare against QUIC. But we're not. We're having a conversation where shipping performant code runs a protocol and you're presenting an alternative that pretty much exists only as a PDF document.
Believe me, I looked to figure out if there was a good solution for incorporating MinimaLT into code right now and there's not. I have a project where this is relevant. I'm looking at QUIC now and I may incorporate it as an alternative transport layer. (It duplicates some of my own work though, so I'm not sure whether to strip that stuff out or just make mine flexible enough to work on top.)
(To say nothing that QUIC can be implemented without a kernel module, which is a handy side-effect of doing things over UDP. A shame that's a factor, but of course it is in realistic systems deployment.)
Re. kernel module: both QUIC and MinimaLT can be implemented in user space.
Things like games and video streams are almost universally UDP, because it's better to forget about the data than stop everything, and go get your lost packet.
It's a shame that SCTP is not more widely adopted, as I suspect it may be just as good (if not better) as a transport layer for building a new web protocol on.
The key is "Conceptually, all handshakes in QUIC are 0-RTT, it’s just that some of them fail and need to be retried" (at least the first time you contact the server a 1-roundtrip handshake is required).
Does UDP mess up other traffic?
Does QUIC make things more complex? You are replacing TCP + TLS with roughly TLS over UDP with some reliability features build in. TLS and TCP are already crazy complex (behold the state diagram from closing a TCP connection! [CS undergrad heads explode]). Plus, people have already built a number pseudo TCP protocols run over UDP.
QUIC + their kindof TLS lite protocol is certainly newer and less well know. That may make things a little harder. But ARP is complex. IP is complex. TCP is complex. Wireshark and others largely abstract this away. I'm excited by the speed, and by the hopefully reduced attack surface of these potentially simpler protocols.
I for one welcome what this would do for me on high-latency high-loss connections (read: poor cell phone coverage). I just need Apple to buy into this ...
But realistically speaking, it's going to benefit content providers more than the average browser. I'm talking about magnitude of impact here. I did not that that is would not impact the average user, but the magnitude of the impact is nowhere near as much as the boon to Google.
And your metaphor makes absolutely no sense since apparently large swaths of Chrome users already have this in their hands today!
For example, such stacks often put the entire communication stack in userspace, with hardcoded knowledge of how to talk to a specific hardware networking stack, and no ability to cooperate with other clients on the same hardware.
They are limited in what they can do because they have to talk to the exchange, so its still tcp/ip for order sending, with either FIX or a binary protocol like ITCH/OUCH on top.
as far as their networking stack, if they are ultra low HFT then they'll use FPGA's and Arista brand switches or Infinband hardware.
The only big customization that most HFT firms do is move the networking stack into user land, but that's a well known area. I"m not aware of any HFT firms that write their own networking stack from the ground up though I'm sure there are a few:)
Not much that they do is transferable to everyday computing because most, I'd say 90%, of the performance comes from custom hardware and not the software.
Or put another way, Google already has more than enough talent to optimize their QUIC protocol, buying a HFT firm wouldn't do much for them as the HFT speed comes from area's that most people setting up servers won't want touch.
Financial incentives made HFT's and alike go farther than the average software companies - just look at the microwave networks.
However, if the promise is to be an always-encrypted Transport layer (kind of like how CurveCP [1] wanted to be - over TCP though) with small performance gains - or in other words no performance drawbacks - then I'm all for it.
I'm just getting the feeling Google is promoting it the wrong way. Shouldn't they be saying "hey, we're going to encrypt the Transport layer by default now!" ? Or am I misunderstanding the purpose of QUIC?
[1] - http://curvecp.org/
Google is say that, for clients connecting to the same site, the slowest 1% of those clients saw a 1 second improvement in page load time by using QUIC instead of TCP. (presumably its SPDY + QUIC against SPDY + TCP as they say at the end of the article). That's pretty good.
It was 1 second shaved
The 100ms ping time in the diagram may be pretty high for connections to Google, with its large number of geographically distributed servers, but for J. Random Site with only one server... it's about right for US coast-to-coast pings, and international pings are of course significantly higher. [1] states that users will subconsciously prefer a website if it loads a mere 250ms faster than its competitors. If two websites are on the other coast, have been visited before, and are using TLS, one of them can get most of the way to that number (200ms) simply by adopting QUIC! Now, I'm a Japanophile and sometimes visit Japanese websites, and my ping time to Japan is about 200ms[2]; double that is 400ms, which is the delay that the same article says causes people to search less; not sure this is a terribly important use case, but I know I'll be happier if my connections load faster.
Latency is more important than people think.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-u...
How does this work?
As a total guess, I assume the client gets a stream of packets, buffers them all up, waits for some threshold before re-requesting any missing sequence numbers. When that missing packet comes back in (all while the stream continued) with its new number, it puts in in place, and pushes the data up to the application and clears it's buffer. Client probably sends "I'm good up to sequence n" every once and a while so the server can clear it's re-transmit buffer.
That's pretty cool. Treat it as a lossy stream, rather than a "OH CRAP EVERYBODY STOP EVERYTHING, FRED FELL DOWN!". With this, FRED IS DED!
Others have discussed the technical aspects of what QUIC is achieving, but you can understand its purpose fairly easily by saying "QUIC" out loud ;)
If that's not clear enough, it stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections", which I think makes it fairly clear what it achieves. You can read more about it in the FAQ: https://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/document/d/1lmL9EF6qK...
Note that the blog post doesn't say "1% slowest sites", it says "1% slowest connections" - that's the mobile and satellite users. Think about how many seconds it takes to load google.com on your phone when your signal isn't great. How does taking a second off that sound to you?