ReadWriteWeb

If you're one of the few Firefox users still on Windows 2000 or still using Windows XP without Service Pack 2 or later, Firefox is going to have to say goodbye. Yesterday, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler announced that Firefox team is moving to a newer version of the Visual Studio toolchain. Once Mozilla moves to Visual Studio 2010, they won't be able to build for Windows 2000, XP RTM or SP1.

SPDY is a hypertext protocol developed by Google as an alternative/compliment to HTTP. It improves the performance of modern websites by adding a few features such as multiplexed requests, prioritized requests and compressed headers. You can read our previous coverage for more information.

How can you take advantage of SPDY on your own site? So far, only Google Chrome (versions 6.0 and up) support SPDY, so you'll need to support two protocols: SPDY for Chrrome, and HTTP for everything else. You'll also need to automatically switch between the two protocols depending on the browser your visitors are using.

Strangeloop Site Optimizer now does just that.

Google has been obsessed with speeding up the web for quite a while now. The company's most recent efforts towards this goal include Google Instant for speeding up search, the Page Speed tool for developers and webmasters and the more low-level SPDY protocol which augments the HTTP standard.

Today, Google is also introducing mod_pagespeed, a newmodule for Apache, the open-source Web server that runs most of the world's websites. This new module includes more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that can reduce page load times by up to 50%.

Google has just announced that it is working on a new protocol that will minimize latency and speed up the Web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced "speedy") is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows Web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype Web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.