Standards organization officially publishes http/2 standard

The IETF HTTP Working Group has officially approved and published the HTTP/2 specification. This means that there is formally a successor to the http 1.1 specification, which has been the basis of the current web for sixteen years.

The specification has been laid down in RFC7540 after the public was allowed to judge the draft in recent months. This means that consensus has been reached by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the IETF.

Http/2 introduces, among other things, the multiplexing option, whereby multiple http requests can be sent bundled from the browser to a web server. This significantly reduces the total number of active connections compared to http 1.1. This results in speed gain. Furthermore, http/2 handles encryption via the tls protocol more efficiently and HTTP header compression is possible.

The http/2 standard, largely based on the spdy protocol developed by Google, is the replacement for the http 1.1 protocol after sixteen years. Unlike the spdy protocol, in the http/2 standard it is not mandatory to enable tls encryption. It will also take some time before the specification becomes dominant: a lot of software still has to be adapted for this.

The browsers Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer offer the http/2 standard out-of-the-box. Chrome also has the support, but does not offer it by default for the time being. This will happen in future versions, because the spdy protocol is expected to disappear completely early next year.