Microsoft Unveils New Plan to Speed Up the Web
Microsoft wants in on the drive to speed up the web. The company plans to submit its proposal for a faster internet protocol to the standards body charged with creating HTTP 2.0. — Not coincidentally, that standards body …
Context & Ripple Effects
The speed-up-the-web push is no longer a one-company experiment. Google has been iterating on its SPDY protocol, Twitter signed on by adopting SPDY earlier in March 2012 (Twitter catches the SPDY train), and Google had already tested the waters of shipping non-standard performance tech with WebP back in 2010. With SPDY deployments accumulating outside Google's walls, the question shifted from whether faster transport was worth building to who would own its standardization.
Microsoft's answer is procedural rather than proprietary: submit a proposal to the standards body charged with producing HTTP 2.0, the same body whose deliberations SPDY is already influencing. The pickup across MSDN Blogs, Engadget, and trade outlets signals this is an official engineering commitment, not a research paper — and it lands in the same week Microsoft announced ASP.NET MVC would be developed in the open under the Apache license on CodePlex with new git support.
First-order effects
- Microsoft enters the HTTP 2.0 process directly, giving the standards body a second major vendor proposal alongside Google's SPDY lineage instead of ratifying de facto Google control.
- Browser makers and site operators tracking SPDY adoption — Twitter being the marquee example — gain a competing candidate to evaluate before committing their stacks.
Second-order effects
- Google's strategy of spreading SPDY through voluntary adopters faces a counterweight: vendors can now wait for a negotiated standard rather than implementing a Google-originated protocol wholesale.
- CDNs and large web properties get leverage in the transition calculus, since a multi-vendor standard lowers the risk of betting on any single company's transport layer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web performance stops being a series of unilateral vendor formats — WebP, SPDY — and becomes a contested standards negotiation where browser vendors compete inside the process rather than around it.
- A successfully standardized HTTP 2.0 would make transport-level speed a baseline expectation, shifting competitive differentiation toward implementation quality in each vendor's browser and server stack.
The trend: Web performance is moving from single-vendor experiments like SPDY and WebP into formal HTTP 2.0 standardization, where Microsoft, Google, and other browser makers negotiate the next generation of the web's core protocol.