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One web technology poised to provide significant latency improvements across websites and applications is the new HTTP/3 protocol.
Still in the process of major browser adoption, HTTP/3 aims to optimize and secure web traffic for how the modern internet actually operates today.
Since its inception in the early 1990s, the HTTP protocol that underpins communication across the web has received relatively few major upgrades.
However, the web has grown exponentially in complexity which has exposed key performance gaps in HTTP traffic that HTTP/3 now aims to fix:
- Head-of-line Blocking — With HTTP/1 & HTTP/2, if one resource on a page is delayed in transmission, all other resources must wait behind this bottleneck before they can be processed by the client browser. This leads to unnecessary lag for many assets that could be handled faster.
- Connection Congestion — Due to protocols like TCP and the need to re-establish socket connections repeatedly to the server, resource contention and congestion can easily emerge resulting in choppy delivery speeds.
- Security Limitations — Prior versions of HTTP lacked native end-to-end encryption meaning traffic was open to inspection and attacks when sent over the public internet to clients.
