HTTP 2.0 Protocol
Good news for all internet users. The new version of the HTTP protocol is officially completed and approved. Mark Nottingham, president of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the working group behind the creation of internet standards, has announced in a blog post that the HTTP 2.0 specifications are finalized. Now the specifications will go through the last formalities prior to Protocol publication as a new standard. The modification is the largest HTTP variation in the last 16 years.
HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is familiar to most users as http:// at the beginning of a web address. HTTP Protocol governs the connections between the user’s browser and the server that hosts a website, invented by the father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. The last protocol update had been in 1999, when HTTP 1.1 was adopted. The new version promises to deliver Web pages to browsers faster, allowing users to read more pages, buy more things, and perform faster searches on the Internet.
HTTP/2 is based on SPDY Protocol, a protocol introduced by Google in 2009 and adopted by some technologies including their own browser Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer from Microsoft, many websites such as Facebook, and some of the softwares that provide Web pages to browsers. SPDY was designed to speed up web pages’ loading and users’ browsing experience online. In addition, both SPDY and HTTP/2 use “header field compression” and “multiplexing” to allow that browsers are able to do multiple requests to web servers through a single connection. The new protocol uses “multiplexing” to allow many messages to be interspersed on a connection at the same time, so that the answers that take a long time for the server to load do not block the ones that are running in parallel. Another amendment is related to security, by replacing TLS encryption technology (Transport Layer Security, previously called SSL Secure Sockets) with HTTP/2.
We still don’t know whether all browsers have adopted the new protocol, but standardization is required so that all users can take advantage of the new standard. Google has already announced that it will adopt HTTP/2 on Chrome in early 2016. The trend is that after Google, the other browsers follow the example.
News source: The Hacker News
