Remember HTTP/2?

The HTTP/2 specification RFC 7540 waspublished in May 2015 and the protocol has since then been implemented anddeployed widely across the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In early 2018, almost 40% of the top-1000 web sites run HTTP/2, around 70% ofall HTTPS requests Firefox issues get HTTP/2 responses back and all majorbrowsers, servers and proxies support it.

HTTP/2 addresses a whole slew of shortcomings in HTTP/1 and with theintroduction of the second version of HTTP users can stop using a bunch ofwork-arounds. Some of which are pretty burdensome on web developers.

One of the primary features of HTTP/2 is that it makes use of multiplexing, sothat many logical streams are sent over the same physical TCP connection. Thismakes a lot of things better and faster. It makes congestion control work muchbetter, it lets users use TCP much better and thus properly saturate thebandwidth, makes the TCP connections more long-lived - which is good so thatthey get up to full speed more frequently than before. Header compressionmakes it use less bandwidth.

With HTTP/2, browsers typically use one TCP connection to each host insteadof the previous six. In fact, connection coalescing and “desharding”techniques used with HTTP/2 may actually even reduce the number of connectionsmuch more than so.

HTTP/2 fixed the HTTP head of line blocking problem, where clients had to waitfor the first request in line to finish before the next one could go out.