Cloudflare announced recently that HTTP / 3 support is now available on your network, With which from now on, your customers will be able to activate an option in their panels and enable HTTP / 3 support for your domains.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) also reported that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, two of the main browser providers, have joined forces to make the Web faster and confiable. The addition of Cloudflare, Google Chrome, and Firefox to support HTTP / 3 is a huge boost for the next great iteration of HTTP and a start of a major change for Internet users.
It should be remembered that the TCP protocol was designed in the 1970s and no one expected it to be used for near real-time communications, as is the case today.
As time goes by, applications evolve and require speed, and software engineers have begun to understand that TCP has never been designed to meet the demands of speed. So they began to consider other protocol options to make the Internet faster.
This is how Google engineers created the SPDY network protocol which fixed some of the TCP issues. Thus, the Internet has become HTTP-over-SPDY, a protocol that has finally officially become HTTP / 2 and is now used by about 40% of websites.
Cloudflare says that once HTTP / 3 support is enabled for a customer's domain in your Cloudflare dashboard, that client will be able to interact with your websites and APIs using HTTP / 3.
HTTP / 3 is the next major version of HTTP, the protocol by which content is passed from servers to clients, where it is displayed in browsers, mobile applications, or other applications. Cloudflare says that it has since collaborated with industry colleagues through the Internet Engineering Task Force, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, to iterate over standard HTTP / 3 and QUIC documents.
It is in this that HTTP-over-QUIC, which became HTTP / 3 later. This is ua complete rewrite of the HTTP protocol It uses the QUIC protocol instead of the TCP protocol and also comes with TLS support, a built-in encrypted information transport encryption security standard.
According to Ryan Hamilton, Google Software Engineer
HTTP / 3 should improve the Web for everyone. The Chrome and Cloudflare teams worked closely together to move HTTP / 3 and QUIC from emerging standards to widely adopted technologies to improve the Web.
A strong partnership between industry leaders is what makes Internet standards innovations possible, and we look forward to continuing to work together.
From SPDY, Google engineers realized that they could do much better if they combined the reliability of TCP and the speed of UDP in a totally new protocol. This is how QUIC, or Quick UDP Internet Connections, was born, a new protocol that combines the best features of TCP and UDP, to build an even faster Layer 4 transport protocol.
Google added support for the new protocol in Chrome Canary earlier this month. This means that whenever users visit a Cloudflare-hosted website from Chrome Canary or other HTTP / 3-compliant browsers, the connection automatically switches to the new protocol, rather than being managed through older versions.
Also Mozilla will also implement support for HTTP / 3. The browser maker is expected to deliver HTTP / 3 in an upcoming version of Firefox Nightly later this year.
Since last year, Cloudflare had announced preliminary support for QUIC and HTTP / 3 (or "http-over-QUIC" as it was called at the time, before being renamed in November 2018 to officially become HTTP / 3).
The new web standard enables faster, more reliable, and more secure connections to web-enabled devices, such as websites and APIs.
Cloudflare had also allowed its customers to join a waiting list to test QUIC and HTTP / 3 as soon as they become available.
Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/