Cloudflare, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have all added support for the next major iteration of the HTTP protocol, HTTP/3.
Users of Cloudflare will have the option to turn on HTTP/3 support for their domains by simply enabling an option from their dashboards, according to Cloudflare itself. The connection will be automatically upgraded to the new protocol when users will visit Cloudflare-hosted websites using an HTTP/3-capable client.
Chrome Canary, the experimental version of Google Chrome, added support for HTTP/3 earlier this month, and users will have to use a Chrome command-line tag. Later this fall, it will be Mozilla’s turn to provide support for the new protocol by using the upcoming Firefox Nightly.
What is HTTP/3
HTTP is Hypertext Transfer Protocol and it’s the technology that enables URLs. Hyperlinks and URLs are technically different, but a hyperlink control can go directly to the target URL.
HTTP/3 is the next major version of the HTTP protocol which allows content to move from servers to clients. HTTP/3 uses the QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol and not the TCP like previous HTTP. QUIC was created by Jim Roskind at Google as a transport layer network protocol, like UDP and TCP. The new protocol also includes built-in TLS support for encryption.
For the creation of the QUIC protocol, engineers from Google combined the reliability of TCP with the speed of UDP to create an entirely new protocol.
Probably the biggest news is that Cloudflare is making HTTP/3 generally available to its customers. To put it simply, HTTP/3 enables faster, more reliable and more secure connections for the web, so it comes with only benefits.
Programmers from Google and those from Mozilla won’t release Chrome Canary respectively Firefox Nightly for average users. Both of these experimental releases can be utilized by experienced users that want to test out HTTP/3 for themselves.
