Are you looking for a speedier browsing experience? If you are, you might be interested to learn that Google has announced that they will soon be adopting the HTTP/2 protocol in the coming weeks, which in theory should help speed up your browsing. Prior to this, Google was relying on their homegrown SPDY protocol but has confirmed they will be ditching support for that in 2016.So was Google’s SPDY protocol efforts all for naught? Hardly. According to Google, it seems that the HTTP/2 protocol does contain some elements of SPDY. “Some key features such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY.”
Google wasn’t the first to announce their support for the HTTP/2 protocol. Back in 2014, Microsoft too announced their support and implementation of the protocol, although they noted that it would be found in Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 Technical Preview, so it hasn’t exactly become mainstream yet.
It will probably also be a while before we can start seeing real improvements as other browser makers and web developers will also need to take advantage of its improvements as well, but it is still an exciting start with Microsoft and Google already laying the groundwork.