Google pumps up latest Chrome build with experimental QUIC network protocol

Google has been tweaking the standards of web communication for a while now. The company initally did this by introducing the SPDY protocol, which is now the de facto standard protocol as of July 2012. SPDY also serves as the base for the forthcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol. Now Google is planning to unveil an even lower level-protocol called Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), according to TNW. QUIC is being added to Chrome Canary, which is the latest version of its browser.

SPDY protocol, which is currently what Google is providing for browsers, has seen implementation in Chromium, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. SPDY is similar to HTTP in the sense that it focuses on reducing the web page load latency, i.e., how long it takes for a web page to load on browsers, as well as looking at improving Web security.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

First off, what is a protocol? Basically, a protocol is a set of invisible computer rules that defines how an Internet document gets transmitted to a user’s screen. A protocol is recognisable by the first several letters in a user’s browser’s address bar, which will end in the three characters ‘://’. One of the most common protocols that users currently see in the address bar is http://, which reflects a regular hypertext page. Another protocol which is also common is https://, which shows a secured hypertext page to prevent hacking.

Chrome Canary should soon see Google’s latest experimental network protocol, QUIC

While QUIC packs lot of new features, the core point to be noted is that it runs a stream multiplexing protocol on top of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Google has said that it has been working on both a QUIC client implementation and prototype server implementation for some time now. The company also said that the initial tests of UDP connectivity have given favourable results.

According to the official blog, Google is planning to put the new protocol through the ropes by putting it into a small percentage of Chrome canary and developer channel traffic in some Google servers. The company has said that “users shouldn’t notice any difference–except hopefully a faster load time.”

Google is looking to speed up the Web, plain and simple. While the SPDY protocol that was released earlier yielded favourable results, the company was not completely happy with the results. The blog showed that, with the company saying, “despite increasing bandwidth, round trip time (RTT)–which is ultimately bounded by the speed of light–is not decreasing, and will remain high on mobile networks for the foreseeable future. To continue improving network performance we need to decrease the number of round trips, something that is difficult with protocols that currently rely on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).”

QUIC was first seen in February by Google evangelist Francois Beaufort. The protocol was only available for Chromium then, though, which is the open source Web browser project that has a lot in common with Google Chrome in terms of code. The company described Canary as “the most bleeding-edge official version of Chrome and somewhat of a mix between Chrome dev and the Chromium snapshot builds.” Now, if QUIC is actually implemented in Canary and then in Chrome’s developer’s channel, there’s a good chance that it will make it into the beta channel and finally into the stable channel.