What Is HTTP2?
HTTP/2 promises to deliver Web pages to browsers faster, allowing online users to read more pages, buy more things and perform more and faster Internet searches.
HTTP/2 is based on SPDY protocol, a protocol introduced by Google in 2009 and adopted by some technologies including Google’s own Chrome browser, Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, many websites such as Facebook, and some of the software that delivers Web pages to browsers.
SPDY (fittingly pronounced “speedy”) was designed to speed up the loading of web pages and the browsing experience of the online users. Both SPDY and HTTP/2 use “header field compression” and “multiplexing” to let browsers make multiple requests to web servers via a single connection.
How Does HTTP2 Improve On HTTP?
The first thing users might notice with HTTP2 are faster load times on existing websites, thanks to a multiplexing feature that can deliver more HTTP requests at once.
Currently, many developers minimize HTTP requests with hacks like spriting and inlining, which cut down on those requests by, for instance, combining several images into a single file that gets loaded all at once. But these hacks can create their own problems—and anyway, no one should have to hack a good protocol just to give users barely acceptable performance. With HTTP 2, a larger number of requests is no longer a problem, but something it expects.
