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Google to Speed Up Chrome for Fast Internet Browsing

Thursday, January 21, 2016 Wang Wei

Google is planning to make Chrome faster in order to provide its users fast Internet browsing experience.

Thanks to a new, open-source data and web compression algorithm for the Internet called Brotli, which Google announced last year to boost its web page performance.

With Brotli, Google will speed up Chrome and users could get a significant performance boost in coming months.

Google introduced Brotli last September and claimed that the new algorithm is a "whole new data format" that could reduce file sizes by up to 26 percent higher than Zopfli, the company's three-year-old web compression technology.

Net result – Fast Internet Browsing

In a post on Google+ on Tuesday, web performance engineer at Google Ilya Grigorik announced that the new algorithm is coming to Chrome soon, which will change the way files are compressed, improving loading speeds by a quarter.

Besides faster loading speeds, Brotli also have additional benefits for smartphone users, which includes:

Lower data transfer fees
Reduced battery use

Brotli is currently in beta testing mode, with a current status "intent to ship", however, it is likely to be rolled out with the next stable release of Chrome.

Advantages of Brotli

Brotli outperforms gzip for typical web assets (e.g. css, html, js) by 17–25%.
Brotli -11 density compared to gzip -9:
html (multi-language corpus): 25% savings
js (alexa top 10k): 17% savings
minified js (alexa top 10k): 17% savings
css (alexa top 10k): 20% savings

Chrome to Speed Up Web Page Performance Over HTTPS

At present, Brotli is restricted to HTTPS connections, and if you are curious to see Brotli in action, you can activate the feature in Chrome Canary, which is Google's browser for testing new features.

Thereby, you can carry out internet speed test with the help of various website performance testing tools to know what difference Brotli makes to your Internet browsing experience.

So, Get Ready to Speed Up Chrome and make your web page performance faster.

What is HTTP/2 ? Next-Gen Protocol For Faster and Safer Internet

Wednesday, February 18, 2015 Swati Khandelwal

Good news for Internet folks! Get Ready as the entire web you know is about to change. The new and long-awaited version of HTTP took a major step toward becoming a reality on Wednesday – It is been officially finalized and approved.

Mark Nottingham, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group behind creating the standards, announced in a blog post that the HTTP 2.0 specifications have been formally approved. Now, the specifications will go through a last formality – Request for comment and editorial processes – before being published as a standard.

LARGEST CHANGE IN HTTP OVER LAST 16 YEARS

HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is one of the web standards familiar to most as the http:// at the beginning of a web address. HTTP protocol governs the connections between a user’s browser and the server hosting a website, invented by the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

HTTP/2 is simply an update to the protocol, but is really a huge deal because the last time the HTTP specification was updated back in 1999. This means the HTTP/2 will be the first major update to the HTTP standard over the last 16 years, marking the largest change since 1999 when HTTP 1.1 was adopted that underpins the World Wide Web as we know it today.

WHAT IS HTTP/2 ?

HTTP/2 promises to deliver Web pages to browsers faster, allowing online users to read more pages, buy more things and perform more and faster Internet searches.

HTTP/2 is based on SPDY protocol, a protocol introduced by Google in 2009 and adopted by some technologies including Google's own Chrome browser, Mozilla's Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, many websites such as Facebook, and some of the software that delivers Web pages to browsers.

SPDY (fittingly pronounced "speedy") was designed to speed up the loading of web pages and the browsing experience of the online users. Both SPDY and HTTP/2 use "header field compression" and "multiplexing" to let browsers make multiple requests to web servers via a single connection.

“HTTP/2 uses multiplexing to allow many messages to be interleaved together on a connection at the same time, so that one large response (or one that takes a long time for the server to think about) doesn't block others,” Nottingham said.

BROWSE EVERYTHING FASTER

HTTP/2 won’t replace the traditional web standard what the world knows and loves, but it is expected to help websites load faster and more securely once it’s adopted a wide scale.

"Making HTTP/2 succeed means that it has to work with the existing web. So, this effort is about getting the HTTP we know on the wire in a better way, not changing what the protocol means," Nottingham wrote in a blog post last month.

PUSHES ENCRYPTION

HTTP 2.0 also brings another big change – Encryption. It was originally planned to push encryption technology called TLS (Transport Layer Security, formerly called SSL for Secure Sockets) in HTTP/2, but this was rejected because of inconvenience to certain network operators and proxy vendors by burdening them with new standards.

However, when Firefox and Chrome developers said that they won't support HTTP/2 unless it does support encryption. Therefore, Nottingham says, sites that want to get the benefit of faster browsing "will need to use TLS if they want to interoperate with the broadest selection of browsers."

WHEN WILL USERS GET HTTP/2 ?

As the specification of the HTTP/2 standard is finalized and approved, after going through some editorial processes HTTP/2 will be published and ready for adoption.

Well, to enjoy HTTP/2 on Internet depends on websites, hosting services and companies such as Google to implement the standard. For its part, Google already announced that it will adopt HTTP/2 in Chrome by early 2016. Users can also expect Firefox to follow suit, as well. More information is available in the HTTP/2 FAQ.

The Pirate Bay relaunch is FBI's Honeypot? Pirate Bay Team Responds,'NO WAY'

Wednesday, February 04, 2015 Mohit Kumar

After almost two months of untimely and unexpected outage, The Pirate Bay (TPB) finally came back this weekend. But the re-launch of the infamous torrent-indexing website raised a question among those suspicious about this new setup — Is it really The Pirate Bay?

A few days back we reported that The Pirate Bay – a widely popular file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge – had made its return to the Internet once again after suffering two months of outage following a police raid in Sweden late last year.

Many users, including I, thought the site left dead as last took down was the longest outage the torrenting site has ever experienced. But history repeats and The Pirate Bay made its way a day before it claimed. Pirate lovers around the world rejoiced while others noticed something very suspicious.

IS THE FBI RUNNING THE PIRATE BAY ?

The truth behind The Pirate Bay, like who was driving the re-emergence of the site or who would be currently running the site, is all not known.

But because it was seized and took down the law enforcement, The Pirate Bay could now be in the hands of the FBI, and brought back online as a "honeypot", or fake site meant to collect evidence about users, including pirated content uploaders.

This is what some Reddit and Twitter users thought about the re-launch of the torrent download site. The comments on Reddit and a tweet by an Anonymous sect called The Anonymous Message also points to a federal honeypot masquerading as The Pirate Bay to catch pirates.

WHAT POINTS TO FBI ?

"ALERT: STAY AWAY from The Pirate Bay website as we-have gotten reports That It has-been Indirectly Seized by the FBI and is logging IPs," The Anonymous Message tweeted Sunday, but didn't provide any proof of the FBI involvement in The Pirate Bay.

However, the major concern people thought to have is The Pirate Bay’s use of CloudFlare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) and its SSL service. CloudFlare is a content delivery network that is used by websites with high amounts of traffic in order to protect sites from DDoS attacks and was discovered on the new Pirate Bay upon its return.

Several people voiced concerns that The Pirate Bay, CDN Cloudflare uses in the United States and therefore speculated about a connection to the FBI.

To add more confusion, and create conspiracy, the admin also noted that he had fired all the moderators working for the site, reported Torrentfreak. "Due to severe security issues regarding the old moderator team all moderation has temporarily been disabled," the admin wrote.

THE PIRATE BAY RESPONDED – TPB IS REAL

Today, The Pirate Bay has responded to the concerns about its use of U.S.-based CDN service CloudFlare, explaining that it’s only using Cloudflare temporarily in order to cope with the continued stream of millions of visitors.

"We have seen that there has been some question to why we are using Cloudflare," TPB says in a statement. "This is only initially to handle the massive load upon the servers. It will be removed shortly."

The second concern was the lack of moderation on TPB. As soon as The Pirate Bay returned, many fake torrents have been posted to the site and without moderators these were not removed. However, TPB operators now explain that the decision to keep the staff out was taken as a security measure.

In order to deal with the spam and fake torrent problem TPB added a report link to every torrent details page. "Before we sort everything out we have instead added a 'Report link' to all torrents which you can find in the details page," the admin wrote. "We believe that the TPB community can help moderate the site for the time being."