Firefox slowly catching up with Chrome (not in the browser race as Chrome crossed Firefox and becomes number 2 browser in World but in adding features that Chrome’s already having) recently they added option to import Chrome data and settings to Firefox 11 import wizard, Firefox 11 got yet another Chrome feature, support for SPDY protocol pronounced as” SPeeDy” has been added.
Google developed SPDY protocol as an alternate to HTTP to reduce the latency of pages in 2009 as part of their effort to make the web faster and later built it into Chrome and Chromium. You can see SPDY protocol status which is enabled in Chrome by visiting chrome://net-internals/ page and selecting SPDY tab.
This protocol aims to improve the way browsers and servers communicate. Its an application-layer for transporting content over the web. Lot of sites, in fact Google sites uses SPDY, Chrome users benefits from this.
Enabling SPDY in Firefox 11
Support for SPDY has been landed on Firefox 11 nightly builds, but is disabled by default which you can enable by setting the preference “network.http.spdy.enabled” value to True. Currently this protocol draft specification is still not complete and will remain by default in Firefox 11 till it gets finalized.
Mozilla’s Brian Smith on SPDY Support for Firefox “ There is no concrete plan for enabling support for any particular draft SPDY spec in any particular version of Firefox yet. There’s no way it will be enabled by default in Firefox 11. Our implementation needs a lot more testing, especially since there are already very important SPDY-enabled sites live on the Internet.”
“ Even if we spit out a perfect implementation of the latest draft spec on the first attempt, it might be the case that these existing sites depend on behavior undefined by the spec and/or bugs in Chrome. These kinds of issues still need to be found and addressed “