Latest Firefox Beta Turns On the ‘SPDY’
With Firefox 12 out the door, Mozilla is turning its efforts to polishing up Firefox 13, due out six weeks from now. — If you don't want to wait that long, you can download Firefox 13 from the beta release channel today.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mozilla's 2012 roadmap, laid out in March, made SPDY one of the headline items for Firefox this year alongside quiet updates and better web app support (What to Expect from Firefox in 2012). Flipping the protocol on by default in the Firefox 13 beta is the first concrete step from roadmap promise to shipping behavior.
The cadence itself is part of the story: since the twelfth and last Firefox 4 beta kicked off the rapid-release era, major version numbers have arrived every few weeks, and Firefox 13 landing in beta the day Firefox 12 shipped keeps that rhythm intact.
First-order effects
- Beta-channel users get SPDY enabled by default, meaning connections to servers speaking the protocol speed up with no action required from them — a silent performance upgrade ahead of the stable Firefox 13 release expected in about six weeks.
Second-order effects
- Web operators running SPDY-capable servers gain a second major browser audience overnight once the change reaches stable, strengthening the case for serving the protocol; rival browser makers now face pressure to make their own SPDY implementations default-on rather than opt-in.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, transport-layer performance becomes a browser battleground decided by vendor defaults rather than slow standards processes — Mozilla can move a wire protocol from experiment to mainstream inside a single release year, and other browsers must follow or concede page-load benchmarks.
The trend: Rapid-release browser cycles are letting vendors like Mozilla turn experimental network protocols such as SPDY into de facto web standards by flipping defaults, compressing what used to take years of standardization into months of beta testing.