HTTP 3 is coming soon

HTTP 3

This is a protocol that has not yet emerged. However, I noticed that YouTube has been using HTTP 3 in Chrome (not sure about others though!). How do I know? Because I use a plugin to see the HTTP protocol (HTTP/2 and SPDY indicators).

What's new?

The new specification also promises a faster, better, and more secure web experience. But how?

HTTP 3 intends to simplify the TCP handshake (it's a 3-way handshake, hi, hi again, okay, you got my hi, same). On top of that, the connection establishment speed using the QUIC protocol is faster, which is also new.

Enhanced connection establishment guarantees better connection migration between WiFi connections and mobile networks, etc. Note that this is not the connection migration you see between routers on the same network. Much more complicated.

Finally, this also promises to eliminate TCP slow start, allowing for instant high speeds. This will really make 5G exciting! Instead of having to see speeds start at 10Mbps and increase to 1.5Gbps. This is important for gaming in situations like Stadia.

This could be YouTube super fast, streaming in HD from boot, with no buffering. The perfect spec will probably be out closer to the end of the year.

What is HTTP?

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is a set of rules used to deliver web pages from a server to a browser. HTTPS simply means using the same protocol over an encrypted layer for better privacy.

HTTP and its layers (TCP/IP Stack). Source: Mozilla Dev

For those familiar with the OSI (Open Systems Interconnections) Internetworking/Communications specifications, HTTP is an application layer protocol. This means that it is agnostic to the underlying hardware architecture or media. This allows the HTTP specification to be improved and upgraded with increased bandwidth, etc. You will see this happening shortly!

Fetching the page. Source: Mozilla Dev

The client in this definition is the user agent. This could be a browser, program, or anything that makes calls to the server using the HTTP protocol. The web server is responsible for sending or providing the requested content. The agent coordinates the communication between the web server and the user agent.

The functions of the agent are as follows:

• cache
• Filtering (hide adult content or block content based on region)
• Load balancing (direct requests to idle servers)
• Authentication (allows users to communicate with other servers)
• Logging (HTTP logging is often used for anomaly detection, etc.)

In HTTP 1 or (1.1), only the above tasks were carried out peacefully. However, in 2009, an updated protocol HTTP 2 began to be proposed.

HTTP 2

HTTP 2 was proposed to address some limitations encountered by HTTP 1 as network technology and bandwidth advances.

• Multiplexing is required. This allows for concurrent requests over the same TCP connection, which helps load resources simultaneously.
• Allows the browser to prioritize what content to fetch first, so that web pages load faster, or increase the perceived speed of page loading.
• Reduce the weight of HTTP headers.
• Server push enables the server to push resources before the web browser asks. This makes the round trip time for parsing HTML and re-fetching HTML content much shorter.

HTTP 2 provides a faster and more secure (HTTP encryption is mandatory in HTTP 2) web experience.