HTTP/3 – Making the Internet More Independent
Author: Kostas Papanikolaou
Categories: Technology
HTTP/3 – Making the Internet More Independent
If you are familiar with the Internet, there is a strong chance you might have heard about HTTP, short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is the universal protocol for transferring text data and in a nutshell, it’s the backbone of the entire Internet. Introduced in 1989 as HTTP/0.9, now it is getting ready to fully transition from HTTP/2.0 (2015) to HTTP/3, and bring forth further innovation to the web.
Since its invention, the Internet has always been about performance and speed. After humans got used to having it in their grasp, they wanted it to become faster, better, and bigger. More and more information became available and therefore needed to be transferred through the web. This is where HTTP/3 comes in and promises to make the Internet faster, and better in performance. How? Here are the features HTTP/3 is bringing forth.
Faster request multiplexing
Prior to HTTP/2.0 being released, Internet browsers were able to send only one request to a server at a time. A direct result of that was decreased performance and loading speed, with browsers loading one asset at a time (CSS or JavaScript). With HTTP/2.0, the option to load more than one asset at a time was introduced, but TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) -over which is HTTP is traditionally done- could not handle that. In HTTP/3, TCP has been removed and replaced by QUIC, a new protocol that is the center of this new version of HTTP.
Faster Encryption
Thanks to QUIC, the initial connection that allows the HTTP requests of browsers to be encrypted is combined with a TLS handshake. This offers both security as well as higher speed.
Standardization
An IETF Working Group is working on a draft to standardize QUIC. Its version for HTTP/3 is modified in the sense that it uses TLS instead of Google’s encryption, nevertheless bringing the same advantages.
Browser Support
As of early 2021, Google Chrome supported HTTP/3 by default thanks to Google being the one that created the QUIC protocol and the one that introduced the proposal for HTTP over QUIC. Mozilla Firefox also supports this protocol in versions 88+ that do not have a flag. Safari 14 also supports HTTP/3, but an experimental flag needs to be enabled first.
Serverless/CDN Support
Daily, the share of servers that support HTTP/3 is growing. Cloudflare was one of the first companies in the world to support the new Hypertext Transfer Protocol (apart from Google), and as a result, their serverless functions and CDN are compliant with HTTP/3. In addition, Fastly and Google Cloud are compliant with the new version, but Microsoft Azure CDN and AWS CloudFront are not. Cloudflare supports QUIC and HTTP/3 with the help of its own open-source implementation, written in Rust, named Quiche.
Tags: browsers, Google, http, http/3, Internet, internet browsing
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