It has been a long time since http/2 was introduced to the world. Http/2 promised higher speed, lesser packets, multiplexing, and much more. We know there is a profound difference between http/1.1 and http/2 but many things remain unsolved. That is why IETF in collaboration with google started developing the newest version of http, version 3 based on the QUIC protocol.
Http/3 is completely different because it is UDP (User Datagram Protocol) based. As we know TCP and UDP protocols differ in many ways. And that’s why google came up with their UDP-based QUIC protocol. It takes pros like reliability and flow control from TCP, although it sits on top of UDP.
![](https://cloudinfrastack.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/http3_02.png)
QUIC has been in use since 2013 experimentally, but now google states they are using QUIC in 90 % of their infrastructure. But why is QUIC such a big deal when it comes to HTTP? Because since 2018 a special group from IETF alongside with google is working on a standardized version. Upgrades and changes are huge, from independent streams always on encryption and better header compression to 0 second handshakes, we can get loading time improvement by 10-20%. You think “It’s not that much …”, well if you see the bigger picture, it is a monstrous improvement. Google claims that 25% of all Internet traffic is going through their infrastructure. You can now see that even 10 % is a huge performance upgrade.
But will it be implemented on-non google web servers and if so, when ? Time will tell, but the truth is that what we know from analysis, half of all web servers don’t even have http/2 yet.
The original autor: Vojta, Junior Network and Linux Administrator, cloudinfrastack