[otterley]

Google did a great deal of research on the question using real-world telemetry before trying it in Chrome and proposing it as a standard to the IETF’s working group. And others including Microsoft and Facebook gave feedback; it wasn’t iterated on in a vacuum. The history is open and well documented and there are metrics that support it. See e.g. https://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper/