Disable SPDY in Chrome in Preferences

Question

How does one disable SPDY in Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers, using the preferences?

According to several webpages, including http://www.jamiestarke.com/2011/09/02/are-googles-services-running-slow-in-chrome-try-disabling-spdy/

disabling SPDY at the command-line can be done with the --use-spdy=off switch.

However, I want to disable SPDY all the time, even if the switch is not used.

This page: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/chromium-reviews/kvDl2az5_cE Suggests that there is a "spdy.disabled" preference. Where and how exactly should this preference be applied?

Solution

The site that you mention happens to be the internal review of Chrome. It's likely that this will be in a future version of Chrome (but doesn't appear to be there yet) even in the latest Canary build.

Through my empirical tests, it appears that SPDY is not actually the problem, but rather the SSL layer that Chrome uses has some non-standard attributes, that get mistaken by traffic shaping and throttling techniques. So the --use-system-ssl is the more important flag. From my tests, SPDY made almost no difference, and the System SSL flag had a very significant difference.

What operating system are you running? In my blog that you referenced above ( http://www.jamiestarke.com/2011/09/02/are-googles-services-running-slow-in-chrome-try-disabling-spdy/ ) there are instructions for setting the flag in the application links, such as the start menu, quick bar, etc.