Chrome and Firefox will soon support HTTP/3: Here’s what will change

Websites will soon become more responsive as they move to the new version of the HTTP protocol. Cloudflare, the web infrastructure that provides DNS security and support layers to many of the most popular websites in the world, has announced that it has initiated the implementation of HTTP/3 support at the outset.

Later, Google and Mozilla also made their announcements on the subject: Chrome has already introduced the support of the protocol on the Canary version, Firefox instead will receive it starting from a Nightly build that will be released by the end of this fall.

What is HTTP/3 and what changes from HTTP/2?

HTTP/3 is the most-recent iteration of the HTTP protocol, or the infrastructure used to send data from a server – where the site is ” physically ” hosted – to the client used by the end user, such as a web browser.

The HTTP protocol has undergone a series of revisions over the years: HTTP/1.1 has been used from 1997 until 2015, when the HTTP/2 protocol has been standardized offering great benefits in terms of reactivity thanks to the possibility of making requests in parallel.

In recent years, we have also seen an extensive adoption of the HTTPS standard, the version of HTTP designed to have greater security thanks to the use of encryption protection between the communications that take place between the server and the client.

HTTP/3 will represent a big paradigm change with respect to the previous standards : instead of the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) the new version will use QUIC, which is faster and maintains the support of TLS (Transport Layer Security), the component of HTTPS security.

Users will be able to benefit immediately from a greater speed of interaction with the sites that will adhere to the new standard : ” The move should improve the web for everyone “, were the words of Google engineer Ryan Hamilton. ” The Chrome and Cloudflare teams have worked closely together to make HTTP/3 and QUIC technologies widely adopted with the sole aim of improving the web “.

HTTP/3 support is already available for Chrome Canary users, the version with the most recent (and least mature) innovations from Google’s browser. This is an unstable version of the operating system and with potential security bugs, so we advise against using it on a daily basis.

Those who want to try the new protocol can do so by running the browser with the addition of the flag –enable-quic –quic-version = h3-23.

In this way the entry http/2+quic/9 will appear among the options of the browser’s DevTools, text that temporarily represents the support to the HTTP/3 standard.