How do HTTP / 3 and QUIC speed up the browser?

HTTP / 3 is becoming more popular. Cloudflare currently supports HTTP / 3, which is already part of Chrome Canary and will soon be added to Firefox Nightly. This new standard will make web browsing faster and more secure.

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Why HTTTP / 3 and QUIC can speed up the browser?

Web browsers, web servers and other important web infrastructure parts are getting support for a new standard called HTTP / 3, using QUIC. This is a more modern version of HTTP that web browsers use to communicate with the web server and send data back and forth.

HTTP / 3 is written to send data faster with better error resistance. It also has integrated encryption. That means faster speeds and more security. Not only does data speed increase, HTTP / 3 also reduces latency, meaning that websites will start loading faster after a user clicks on the link.

As browsers and websites start communicating over HTTP / 3, the web gets better as more websites choose to use this standard.

From HTTP / 1 to HTTP / 2

How do HTTP / 3 and QUIC speed up the browser? Picture 1

The original version of HTTP used the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). First described in 1974, TCP is not designed to meet today's speed and web responsiveness. Google is trying to fix many TCP problems with a new protocol called SPDY, the official name is HTTP / 2.

HTTP / 2 arrived with most major browsers in late 2015, adding features like data compression and organizing multiple requests over a TCP connection to speed things up.

Since September 2019, W3Techs estimates that HTTP / 2 is currently used by 41% of browsers.

What is HTTP / 3 and QUIC?

HTTP / 3 is a rewrite of the HTTP protocol. Instead of using TCP, HTTP / 3 uses Google's QUIC protocol. HTTP / 3 was originally called HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP / 3 also uses TLS 1.3 encryption so that it doesn't need separate HTTPS to enhance the security of today's protocol.

GUIC was originally short for Quick UDP Internet Connections. This protocol is designed to be faster, with lower latency than TCP. QUIC uses less volume of information exchanged when establishing a connection and faster data transfer through that connection. Unlike TCP, an error like a lost piece of data along the way does not cause the connection to stop and wait for the problem to be fixed. QUIC continues to transfer other data while the problem is resolved.

In fact, QUIC has been added to Google Chrome since 2013. Chrome uses it when communicating with Google services and some other websites like Facebook and it is available on Android apps. But QUIC is not a standard integrated into other web browsers. With HTTP / 3, technology will come as a standard way for other browsers.

In short, HTTP / 3 is a newer, better and faster interface. It is a more modern solution, aimed at improving security and web speed.

HTTP / 3 was added to the latest Canary version of Google Chrome in September 2019, hidden behind the command line flag. Launch Chrome Canary with command line argument --enable-quic --quic-version = h3-23 to enable HTTP / 3.

Mozilla announced it is working to add HTTP / 3 to the experimental version of Firefox Nightly this fall. The Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge will inherit Google's HTTP / 3 that works for Chrome as well as other Chromium-based browsers like Opera. Hopefully Apple will also add HTTP / 3 to Safari in the future.

Cloudflare even announced that it would make it easier to apply HTTP / 3 to websites that use their content delivery network. Cloudflare customers will soon be able to activate HTTP / 3 (with QUIC) for their websites. This will promote the adoption of HTTP / 3 by making the site easier to activate when a browser has HTTP / 3 stable and for everyone.

HTTP / 3 is coming with other software such as Niginx web server based on HTTP / 3 support for Niginx 1.17 minutes.

Cloudflare said it will continue to work with other organizations, including Google and Mozilla, to finalize the QUIC and HTTP / 3 standards and encourage widespread adoption. There is a lot of work to be done before this standard is enabled by default in modern browsers and is used automatically.

Micah Soto

Update 02 October 2019

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