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HTTP/2 Finalized
An anonymous reader writes: Mark Nottingham, chair of the IETF HTTP working group, has announced that the HTTP/2 specification is done. It's on its way to the RFC Editor, along with the HPACK specification, where it'll be cleaned up and published. "The new standard brings a number of benefits to one of the Web's core technologies, such as faster page loads, longer-lived connections, more items arriving sooner and server push. HTTP/2 uses the same HTTP APIs that developers are familiar with, but offers a number of new features they can adopt. One notable change is that HTTP requests will be 'cheaper' to make. ... With HTTP/2, a new multiplexing feature allows lots of requests to be delivered at the same time, so the page load isn't blocked." Here's the HTTP/2 FAQ, and we recently talked about some common criticisms of the spec.
Which will mean one of three things:
1) HTTP/2 will not be used in the wild for anything important. Due to the sheer number of Win7/8 machines out there with IE versions that don't support it.
2) Users on windows will move away from IE. Once people leave they don't typically come back so IE will eventually become an also ran.
3) Microsoft will fear loosing to much browser market share, will back pedal and backport spartan.
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Web pages being slow has nothing to do with HTTP and all to do with bloat eating every bit of performance that is available to the marketers who are in charge of the web now. A binary protocol to save a couple of bytes in times where every web page loads at least three "analytics" scripts weighing dozens of kbytes each. Marketing rots the brain.
4) People enable it on their servers and those with browsers that do support it enjoy the benefits (and possibly some of the side-effects) that it brings, while everybody else will either chug along on HTTP/1.1 or even HTTP/1.0, or switch to a browser that does support HTTP/2, and whether or not older versions of IE support it remains a non-issue.
If people do "switch to a browser that does support http/2", it will be for some other reason unrelated to the protocol - getting http/2 support will be serendipitous. Very few people other than tech heads are going to care about the protocol, one way or the other... they won't even be aware of it.
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