If you're the type of person that closely follows networking protocols and web server optimizations, you've probably heard of SPDY. This is Google's re-imagining of the HTTP protocol, designed to reduce latency, streamline data flow, and generally speed up data transmission from a server to your browser. Well, you can forget about it. Google is about to kill SPDY, but for a good reason. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is getting close to finalizing a major revision to the HTTP protocol, dubbed HTTP/2. The new version, which Google made many significant contributions to, almost completely mirrors the feature set offered by SPDY, including things like multiplexing, header compression, prioritization, and protocol negotiation. Since HTTP/2 will be an official open standard, there's no reason to keep SPDY around anymore.

Support for HTTP/2 will be rolled into Chrome 40 over the next few weeks, but SPDY will remain operational at least until early 2016. This should give developers about a year to migrate to the new protocol, or simply allow their servers to fall back to HTTP/1.1, like they currently do for many other browsers. Alongside the removal of SPDY, Google also plans to remove support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) extension NPN, and replace it with ALPN. A number of implementations have been recommended to help developers adopt HTTP/2 and ALPN on their servers.

Source: Chromium Blog