[throwaway32]

I doubt many sites are going to bother with all the complexity of implementing and utilizing SPDY when only chrome supports it. To see significant advantage with SPDY vs something like long-polling you need to build your app around it, and if you need to support long-polling methods anyways, not very many sites are going to bother.

[nl]

I think you are confusing SPDY[1] with WebSockets[2]. SPDY is Google's experimental replacement for HTTP. You don't build your app around it at all - from the application layer it should be mostly invisible.

SPDY can be implemented as an Apache module[3] which could be used only when the browser supports it.

It is true that WebSockets replace long polling, but there are plenty of libraries that abstract the differences out nicely.

[1] http://www.chromium.org/spdy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket [3] http://code.google.com/p/mod-spdy/

[dangoor]

FWIW, someone is working on an implementation for Firefox. There was just a blog post on HN the other day about it.