Cloudflare, Firefox and Chrome start support for http/3

The Cloudflare network now supports http/3, the specification that succeeds the current http/2 and should, among other things, ensure a faster internet. Chrome also has early support and for Firefox it is on the way.

The http/3 support is still experimental but functional and the joint launch of Cloudflare, Chrome and Firefox shows that the internet standardization procedure works, Cloudflare writes. In practice, Cloudflare has been bringing support to customers in phases for quite some time, but in the coming week, any customer can expect http/3 support from the company.

Chrome Canary has since last week support for the upcoming version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol; this can be enabled with the flag “–enable-quic –quic-version=h3-23”. Mozilla will follow soon with a nightly of Firefox. The command line tool curl also supports it.

The main change with the third generation of the http specification is that it uses the quic devised by Google as the transport protocol instead of tcp. Quic stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections and works via udp. The protocol significantly reduces the communication between client and server to set up connections, implementing tls 1.3 for realizing encrypted connections. This allows faster connections and improves latency and security, that’s the goal.

The http/3 specification is currently still a draft text that the Internet Engineering Task Force is still working on.

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