Last year we announced our intent to end support for the experimental protocol SPDY in favor of the standardized version, HTTP/2. HTTP/2 is the next-generation protocol for transferring information on the web, improving upon HTTP/1.1 with more features leading to better performance. Since then we've seen huge adoption of HTTP/2 from both web servers and browsers, with most now supporting HTTP/2. Over 25% of resources in Chrome are currently served over HTTP/2, compared to less than 5% over SPDY. Based on such strong adoption, starting on May 15th — the anniversary of the HTTP/2 RFC — Chrome will no longer support SPDY. Servers that do not support HTTP/2 by that time will serve Chrome requests over HTTP/1.1, providing the exact same features to users without the enhanced performance of HTTP/2.

At the same time, Chrome will stop supporting the TLS protocol extension NPN, which allows servers to negotiate SPDY and HTTP/2 connections with clients. NPN has been superseded by the TLS extension ALPN, published by the IETF in 2014. ALPN is already used 99% of the time to negotiate HTTP/2 with Chrome, and the remaining servers can gain ALPN support by upgrading their SSL library.

We are looking forward to HTTP/2 continuing to gain adoption, bringing us an even faster web.

Update: To better align with Chrome's release cycle, SPDY and NPN support will be removed with the release of Chrome 51.