[LINK] Firefox Browser, full HTTP/2 support

[Stephen Loosley]

Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation for their latest Forefox broser release. 

This latest Firefox release (v36) now offers full support for the HTTP/2 protocol.

With this release, in my opinion, Firefox continues as the web browser of choice.
 
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https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/36.0/releasenotes

Firefox Release Version 36.0, first offered to Release channel users on February 24, 2015

What’s New

    * Support for the full HTTP/2 protocol. HTTP/2 enables a faster, more scalable, and more responsive web.  (snip)

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https://http2.github.io

HTTP/2

This is the home page for HTTP/2, a major revision of the Web's protocol. 
It is maintained by the IETF HTTP Working Group. https://httpwg.github.io

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 is a replacement for how HTTP is expressed “on the wire.” It is not a ground-up rewrite of the protocol; HTTP methods, status codes and semantics are the same, and it should be possible to use the same APIs as HTTP/1.x (possibly with some small additions) to represent the protocol.

The focus of the protocol is on performance; specifically, end-user perceived latency, network and server resource usage. One major goal is to allow the use of a single connection from browsers to a Web site.

The basis of the work was (Google's) SPDY, but then HTTP/2 has evolved to take the community’s input into account, incorporating improvements in the process.

Status

HTTP/2 is nearly done standardization; it has been approved by the IESG, and is in the RFC Editor’s publication queue.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is the second major version of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It is based on SPDY.

HTTP/2 is being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. HTTP/2 would be the first new version of HTTP since HTTP 1.1, which was standardized in in 1999. The Working Group presented HTTP/2 for consideration as a Proposed Standard in December 2014, and IESG approved it to publish as Proposed Standard on Feb 17, 2015.

The standardization effort came as an answer to SPDY, an HTTP-compatible protocol developed by Google.

The biggest difference between HTTP and SPDY, is that each user action in SPDY is given a "stream ID", meaning there is a single TCP channel connecting the user to the server. SPDY has shown very clear improvement over HTTP, with a new page load speedup ranging from 11.81% to 47.7%.

HTTP/2 uses SPDY as a jumping-off point; though SPDY is an improvement on HTTP 1.1, it does have some limitations. SPDY communicates separately with each host, which means that multiplexing happens only at one host at a time, no matter how many connections are open. This means that SPDY can only download things from one host at a time. The improvement HTTP/2 makes on this is that it allows multiplexing to happen at different hosts at the same time. This makes downloading multiple web pages or content from the Internet significantly faster.

HTTP/2 also uses a fixed Huffman code-based header compression algorithm, instead of SPDY's dynamic stream-based compression. This helps to reduce the potential for attacks on the protocol.

On February 9, 2015, Google announced plans to remove support for SPDY in Chrome by early 2016, in favor of support for HTTP/2, starting with Chrome 40.

http://http2.github.io/faq

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Cheers,
Stephen