HTTP/3 Is Now a Standard: Why Use It and How to Get Started

I’m sure, like me, you welcomed the IETF standard (Internet Engineering Task Force). No, of course, you didn’t — the web just works, so why worry about it? But if you are vaguely intrigued about why the change is happening, here is a short breakdown of the history behind it. Then we will get into the reasons why you should adopt it for your company. HTTP/3 is the third version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and was previously known as HTTP-over-QUIC. QUIC was initially developed by Google and is the successor of HTTP/2. Companies such as Google and Facebook already use QUIC to speed up the web. A Very Short History of HTTP Back in the day, there were two internet protocols that you could choose to work with. Even before the web, we still had to squirt packets of information (or datagrams) from one machine to another across the internet. For a games developer, the important protocol was UDP (User Datagram Protocol). This was the quick, fire and forget standard: you threw a packet across the network Continue reading