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Internet and Web Browsing Are Now Faster: What You Need to Know to Improve Your Web Experience

If you are using the latest version of your favorite web browser, you are probably already benefiting from the new web protocol called “HTTP / 2”. This means that your web browsing experience has become much faster.

If you’re wondering what all this HTTP / 2 chatter means, then this calls for a short history lesson on web evolution:

Browsing online and viewing a website was made possible by communication through a special language called HTTP that was invented by a British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Remarkably, HTTP has remained relatively unchanged for the past 20 years. years despite the web. evolving dramatically during this time period. There’s a shout out to Google, which played an important role in spearheading the goal of speeding up the web with the new HTTP / 2 protocol because, as history shows: it was finally approved by Nottingham, who chairs the HTTP Engineering Working Group of Internet (IETF).

The acceleration of the web in the HTTP / 2 protocol is due to some significant improvements made in the previous HTTP protocol. These can be listed as:

  1. Header compression – Web communication requires the use of “headers”, which increases the overall overhead with data transmissions. The new HTTP / 2 protocol headers will be compressed, resulting in the removal of many redundancies when exchanging data.
  2. Data Multiplexing: Previously, web communication that generally involves a “Request” and “Response” data exchange was done over a single connection that was sequential in order (i.e. Request 1, Response 1, Request 2, Answer 2, etc.). The problem is that most websites are sophisticated and require multiple web communication exchanges. However, setting up multiple simultaneous connections results in performance degradation. The new HTTP / 2 solves this by providing the mechanism to allow multiple web communication exchanges to occur over a single connection that can occur simultaneously. The improvement occurs by removing the “sequential” state and creating multiple connections, which is a cost.
  3. Data in binary form: Previously, data was exchanged in semi-textual form. It is now in pure binary form, which makes data analysis much easier and faster.

Enjoying a faster web experience:

To enjoy the benefits of faster web speed over HTTP / 2, it depends on a few things, including:

  1. If the web server behind the website you are visiting also supports HTTP / 2.
  2. The version of your web browser (if you have the latest version, it probably already supports HTTP / 2).
  3. The web browser (i.e. most browsers only support HTTP / 2 over secure internet connections and reverts to older and slower HTTP for plain text connections. This was done deliberately and as an incentive to encourage website hosts to upgrade their web servers to support the new HTTP / 2 and force all communication to be over secure connections).

HTTP / 2 Compatible Browsers:

So far the list of browsers that support HTTP / 2 is listed below (this is not complete):

  • IE 11 with partial support for HTTP / 2 on Windows 10.
  • Edge from version 12+
  • Firefox from version 42+
  • Chrome from version 45+
  • Chrome for Android from version 47+
  • Safari from version 9+ with partial support for HTTP / 2 on OSX 10.11
  • iOS Safari from version 9.2+
  • Operates from version 34+

Data exchange of web browsers and websites in HTTP / 2:

If you want to know if your browser is exchanging data in HTTP / 2 form for the website you are visiting, you can install a plugin that displays a visual signal in the address bar (usually a green ray). Perform a search for the “HTTP / 2 and SPDY indicator” plugin from the Firefox or Chrome plugin library.

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