Yes, the news is official now; the much awaited HTTP/2 is ready and formally approved by The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). The update means that your webpages would now load faster and connection between the browser and server would last longer.
HTTP/2 is the successor to the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 protocols and is a long awaited upgrade to Hypertext transfer Protocol. HTTP was officially announced in the year 1999 and this is the first major update in 15 years. Currently we use HTTP/1.1.
Difference between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1
So what is the difference between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2? What is the advantage the HTTP/2 brings?
The HTTP/1 biggest drawback is the use of multiple resources that it requires to load resources in parallel. Even though a single HTTP/1 connection can be used to request multiple objects like the images, CSS, etc., these objects are actually arranged in an order, one after the other. Hence, if a particular object gets delayed all other preceding objects are delayed as well. Investment in multiple connections is required by the web clients in order to perform parallel loading.
HTTP/2 overcomes HTTP/1 shortcomings. In HTTP/2 multiple bi-directional streams are multiplexed through a single TCP connection. Each stream is independent and carries a request/response pair. Even if one stream is slow, the connection can still transfer data belonging to other streams. Hence, even if the large object is requested before a small object, response to small object can still be received during the execution of first or before that.
The invention ofHTTP/2 is based on SPDY. SPDY is a Google developed protocol designed to speed up the loading page of the browser by compressing the content and reducing the number of connections. In 2010, SPDY was implemented in Chrome 6. Later on SPDY creators, Roberto Peon and Mike Belshe handed SPDY to the IETF for standardization which finally got approval now.
You can read more on HTTP/2 here.
