Saturday, April 23, 2016

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/1.0 was the protocol used in 1996 and was updated in 1999 as HTTP 1.1. HTTP/2 which does not have this version number with a decimal (it is not HTTP 2.0) was approved in February 2015 and is designed to overcome the older HTTP limitations. These are some of the benefits of using the new standard:
  • Multiplexing and Concurrency
  • No more need to establish multiple connections between Client and Server. Many requests can be sent on the same TCP connection and responses may return not in the order the requests were sent
  • Stream dependencies. Client can indicate which of the resources are more important than the others
  • Header Compression. Drastic reduction in the size of the headers by compression
  • Server Pushing without a request from the client

The HTTP APIs continue to work as that part has not changed but the application can perform better  with reduced consumption of resources.

Read the excellent information  here and here.

Most of the browsers already support HTTP/2 built on Google's SPDY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY) protocol to reduce web content load latency and improving web security. Going forward HTTP/2 will supersede SPDY.

Regarding browser support, the HTTP/2 protocol is supported my most of the browsers as shown in this image taken from here.
http://caniuse.com/#search=http2


HTTP/2 and Microsoft Edge 34.14295.1000.0


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