After HTTP/2, the next come up is QUIC, a new transport network protocol. At the beginning this protocol was designed by Jim Roskind at Google. It was publicly released in 2013 after the implementation and experimentation in 2012. Originally being an acronym for Quick UDP Internet Connections, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has stated it’s the name of the protocol and not an acronym.
Google has been working for quite some time to speed up network protocols in order to optimize network response times. Now that HTTP/2 has been fulfilling its task of speeding up how HTTP uses TCP and has become the basis for fast TLS connections, QUIC goes one step further by aiming to completely replace TCP.
Before becoming an Internet standard, the mapping of HTTP over QUIC was renamed to HTTP/3 in November 2018 by IETF members after a request by Mark Nottingham, the Chair of the IETF HTTP and QUIC Working Groups. This will be the third major version of the HTTP protocol that allows data to be exchanged on the World Wide Web and will succeed HTTP/2. It will take full advantage of the significant performance benefits that QUIC offers.
.. QUIC and HTTP/3#
Google has found that 75% of all requests are served faster over QUIC and that TCP based websites and content that is streamed will greatly benefit from it. Especially video services like YouTube, where users report 30% fewer rebuffers when watching videos over QUIC. With such big changes it will take time for QUIC to become the most commonly used transfer protocol. At the time of writing this only 2.4% of websites use QUIC.
As a next step, HTTP-over-QUIC has been proposed to the IETF and has been approved as HTTP/3. If the standard establishes itself and other servers implement it, the most frequently used transport network protocol used today, TCP, may be replaced on the web.
Google Chrome Canary is the first browser to support HTTP/3 and since version 7.66 curl also supports it. Support for this new HTTP protocol will be coming later in 2019 to Firefox Nightly. As exerimiation continues and improvements are made you will see the support of HTTP/3 grow.
Summary