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As much as SPDY is interesting there are a number of problems that are keeping it from being adopted:

1) Only Chrome supports it and even there it isn't fully supported. One really painful thing it is missing is support for switching from normal HTTP to SPDY without using NPN.

2) It requires the TLS NPN extension to function seamlessly. This is something that is just now being put into the OpenSSL package. It is why you need Chrome to do anything with SPDY, it has a special patch it applies to its internal version of OpenSSL.

It is good that people are taking interest but there is still a lot of work to do.

After seeing http://www.igvita.com/2011/04/07/life-beyond-http-11-googles... I decided to fiddle with doing the same with Node.js https://gist.github.com/911761 I'll be shoring it up into a real module but it is going to require changes to the zlib compression module, the bufferlist/binary module, the put module and to be really useful it will require a special build of Node.js and OpenSSL.



Chrome doesn't use OpenSSL. It uses NSS. At least on Linux and Mac; I believe it uses the system-native crypto libraries on Windows.


It doesn't use it in the browser but it does use it for tools relating to SPDY. See:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/tools/fl...

Regardless, neither OpenSSL or NSS have NPN in a release version. NSS doesn't seem to have merged the patch yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547312


Ah, indeed. Thanks for the pointer!




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