[wladimir]

The same can be said of many of the other remarks in the article. You could even say it is elegant that SPDY only changes things under the hood, and keeps the good parts of HTTP.

SPDY is technically very cool. It's the update of HTTP that was way overdue. I didn't even mention end-users. Not only the user-facing parts of technology are important.

I've been playing around with asynchronous notifications to the browser for more than 10 years, when I wrote a simple html/js-based continuously loading chat. I've seen it all, from polling, comet, flash-based TCP, longpoll, to finally websockets. So for me it's great to finally see server push taken seriously as part of the spec and not sewn on as a third leg :-)

[spokengent]

Sure. Same here. I was writing js chat and realtime games back in '99.

Don't get me wrong, SPDY is cool and good to see. But users won't notice any real difference. It's like when someone re-does a flash game in HTML5 and we (as geeks) go 'wow awesome', and non-geeks go 'uh? so what'

[morrow]

Another thought would be simply that if SPDY makes it more attractive/easier/secure/efficient for developers to implement push, then users will benefit simply from it being included in more apps.

[drivebyacct2]

Except that it's faster, more secure and less prone to bugs caused by poor implementations of comet and other long polling techniques.

The non-geeks do notice. They notice when things don't work on their iPads. They'll notice as security and TLS become a larger and larger focus, and mobile users should appreciate the lower header overhead.