A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built.

Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That's because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s.

SPDY's major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory.

HTTP/2 used SPDY as a launching point, adding some additional features such as more capable multiplexing, and using a slightly different set of TLS extensions. With HTTP/2 accomplishing the same things as SPDY and having the backing of industry consensus, it makes sense for SPDY to be phased out in favor of the standard.

Google plans to remove the protocol in early 2016. It will also remove support for some of the TLS extensions that SPDY uses that HTTP/2 does not. HTTP/2 support will start rolling out with Chrome 40 in the coming weeks.