Argh Google, what's up with you?

[SteveRiley]

Compare the following.

Ordinary page in Rekonq. Note the usual KDE/Qt widget set -- specifically, the scroll bars:

Google, of course, will have nothing to do with that, and instead completley rewrites the frame, including replacing the browser's widget set with its own:

If you look at the HTML, you can see where they detect that the rendering engine is Webkit and substitute their own scrollbars for the built-in ones. Why oh why must you do that, Google? Why does it matter to you what my scroll bars look like? What else might you be doing to my browser that would require me to examine even more thoroughly your HTML?

You're trying to speed up the web with your SPDY thing. Obviously you can't SPDY me up when I'm using Rekonq. So why do you force a bunch more HTML down my throat? You don't do that if I'm using Firefox, and while it supports SPDY, the same particular page in Firefox isn't going through SPDY, so again, why do you care? Grr.

[woodsmoke]

Hi
I had not noticed that, but then I'm not nearly as observant is yourself, but as a sidelight...Microsith is ADVERTISING....in prime time, multiple times..... Internet Explorer.

An assumption about this might be that If "they" can move people away from the OS to the "browser" then they can capture more clicks.

just a thought.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Well, since you mention the Redmond gang... in typical fashion, they announce their own slightly different spec for speeding up the web: HTTP Speed+Mobility. Yes, it's already been nicknamed HTTP S & M

[MoonRise]

Well, since you mention the Redmond gang... in typical fashion, they announce their own slightly different spec for speeding up the web: HTTP Speed+Mobility. Yes, it's already been nicknamed HTTP S & M

Funnnnyyyy!!!!!

[rms]

Tried it on youtube and gmail(FF 12) over 6/6Mb/s connection. It doesn't feel any quicker.

[SteveRiley]

SPDY requires support on both sides: in the browser and on the server. Only with Firefox 13 is SPDY enabled by default; for Firefox 11 and 12, you'll have to go to about:config and change the setting network.http.spdy.enabled to true.

Gmail, Search, Ads, and most other Google properties are SPDY-enabled now. YouTube is not, probably because SPDY mandates SSL (and SSL would slow YouTube a lot). SPDY also, in default configuration, uses a single TCP connection for all HTTP traffic. The likely result of this is actually going to hurt, not help, performance, especially on mobile browsers. Mobile networks have high packet loss. If a mobile browser experiences loss, the entire page will stall until the server figures out what's going on.

SPDY is an interesting experiment, but appears to be languishing. It's been two and a half years since Google published the specifications, and while the code is open source, Google retains intellectual property rights.

[rms]

Yes, did that in about:config. I've read somewhere the other day that it will be enabled by default in FF 13. Strange decision considering the number of sites supporting it presently.

[SteveRiley]

Strange decision considering the number of sites supporting it presently.

Total number of SPDY-enabled sites: a whopping 339. After languishing for quite some time, SPDY has suddenly appeared to become cool. I predict this will fade quickly.