In 2009, Google announced the SPDY application-layer protocol. You know, “Speedy”.

As Google explained at the time, it’s for transporting content over the web, and is designed for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.”

Today, Google is talking about how it’s making the web even speedier and safer. In a post on the Chromium Blog, Google software engineers Will Chan and Roberto Peon write:

Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google’s servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.

We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we’re actively working on a full featuredmod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.

Mozilla (which Google considers a partner, not a competitor, remember) is a contributor to SPDY, and Google says they’re all working hard at finalizing and implementing draft-3 of SPDY early this year.

Best practices for SPDY can be found here.