HTTP-over-QUIC to be renamed HTTP/3 IETF agrees to base the next major iteration of HTTP on Google's QUIC protocol

[nir]

IETF agrees to base the next major iteration of HTTP on Google's QUIC protocol

 

The HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3 and is expected to become the third official version of the HTTP protocol, officials at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have revealed.

 

This will become the second Google-developed experimental technology to become an official HTTP protocol upgrade after Google's SPDY technology became the base of HTTP/2.

 

HTTP-over-QUIC is a rewrite of the HTTP protocol that uses Google's QUIC instead of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) as its base technology.

 

QUIC stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections" and is, itself, Google's attempt at rewriting the TCP protocol as an improved technology that combines HTTP/2, TCP, UDP, and TLS (for encryption), among many other things.

 

Google wants QUIC to slowly replace both TCP and UDP as the new protocol of choice for moving binary data across the Internet, and for good reasons, as test have proven that QUIC is both faster and more secure because of its encrypted-by-default implementation (current HTTP-over-QUIC protocol draft uses the newly released TLS 1.3 protocol).

 

Image: Google

QUIC was proposed as a draft standard at the IETF in 2015, and HTTP-over-QUIC, a re-write of HTTP on top of QUIC instead of TCP, was proposed a year later, in July 2016.

 

Since then, HTTP-over-QUIC support was added inside Chrome 29 and Opera 16, but also in LiteSpeed web servers. While initially, only Google's servers supported HTTP-over-QUIC connections, this year, Facebook also started adopting the technology.

 

In a mailing list discussion last month, Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP and QUIC Working Group, made the official request to rename HTTP-over-QUIC as HTTP/3, and pass it's development from the QUIC Working Group to the HTTP Working Group.

 

In the subsequent discussions that followed and stretched over several days, Nottingham's proposal was accepted by fellow IETF members, who gave their official seal of approval that HTTP-over-QUIC become HTTP/3, the next major iteration of the HTTP protocol, the technology that underpins today's World Wide Web.

 

According to web statistics portal W3Techs, as of November 2018, 31.2 percent of the top 10 million websites support HTTP/2, while only 1.2 percent support QUIC. It took HTTP/2

Source

[nir]

The third major official version of HTTP will be called HTTP/3

 

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is due for another upgrade in the near future. According to ZDNet, members of the Internet Engineering Task Force have agreed to rename the experimental HTTP-over-QUIC protocol to HTTP/3, cementing its place as the most likely successor to the current iteration, which was finalized in 2015.

 

QUIC, which stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections, is a protocol developed by Google which is meant to supersede TCP for data transport on the internet, which it first announced back in 2013. HTTP-over-QUIC, as the name implies, is an update to the HTTP protocol that replaces TCP with QUIC, and it was initially proposed in 2016. QUIC is faster and more secure than previous transport methods because it removes the need for round-trips when connecting to a known server, and it also encrypts data by default.

 

Though its development hasn't been finalized, support for HTTP-over-QUIC has already been implemented in Google's own Chrome browser, and Opera supports it as well. LifeSpeed web servers also support the protocol, and Facebook has apparently started adopting it too.

 

The name change to HTTP/3 was proposed by Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group, in an e-mail discussion, and other members of group chimed in to agree with the change. Last month, Nottingham published a blog post explaining some of the development process of QUIC and where the technology stands now. It should only be a matter of time before it's announced as an official replacement for HTTP/2.

 

Source

[DKT27]

The internet is yet to move towards the second version though. Still, if implemented correctly, this is a good thing.