Google is planning to phase out SPDY support from Chrome by 2016 and include support for HTTP/2 instead. Here is some background on both protocols to help you get started.

SPDY (pronounced speedy) is an open networking protocol developed primarily at Google for transporting web content.SPDY manipulates HTTP traffic, with particular goals of reducing web page load latency and improving web security.

HTTP/2 (originally named HTTP 2.0) is the next planned version of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It is based on SPDY. HTTP/2 is being developed by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis (httpbis) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (bis means “repeat” or “twice”). (via Wikipedia)

Both protocols come with strong Google backing, but in HTTP/2’s case, it is more of an open standard, according to Google. Here is excerpts from the official blog post:

HTTP is the fundamental networking protocol that powers the web. The majority of sites use version 1.1 of HTTP, which was defined in 1999 with RFC2616. A lot has changed on the web since then, and a new version of the protocol named HTTP/2 is well on the road to standardization. We plan to gradually roll out support for HTTP/2 in Chrome 40 in the upcoming weeks.

As a layman user, more speed is good, and opensource is a lot more awesome!

via Chromium Blog.