HTTP/3: Everything you need to know about the next-generation web protocol
&quot;Nearly 8% of the top 10 million websites support HTTP&#x2F;3, according to the latest figures from W3Techs.&quot;<p>And 100% support HTTP&#x2F;1.1.  HTTP.1.1, while not new, sounds quite useful.<p>Being a mostly non-commercial, text-only web user, I only request resources from the host domain.  The browser does not automatically follow URLs sourced in a page nor does it process Javascript to fetch or make XHR for additional resources.  Often I do not use a browser to make HTTP requests, preferring to use smaller command line utilities instead, as for me this can be faster and more flexible.  There is never any delay for a website to &quot;load&quot;.  For example, if I request the resource &quot;index.html&quot; from the host example.com, I do not make connections to any third party host domains, e.g., doubleclick.net.  Thus, &quot;head-of-line blocking&quot; is generally not an issue.<p>Perhaps if I were requesting multiple resources, e.g., index0001.html through index1500.html, from example.com, then HTTP&#x2F;3 might be faster than HTTP&#x2F;1.1 pipelining, but I have not seen any evidence to support that idea.  I have been using HTTP&#x2F;1.1 pipelining to request multiple resources from the same host for a long time.  Year after year it keeps working, and in some cases working better than ever before.  In the years before Nginx was popular, when Apache was the most popular web server, it was common to see maximums set at 100 HTTP requests per TCP connection.  Today, in some cases, maximums seem to have no upper bound.  I have made thousands of HTTP requests over a single TCP connection.<p>The so-called &quot;head-of-line blocking&quot; problem seems to be restricted to &quot;complex&quot; websites that use resources from multiple hosts, especially trackers and ad servers.  Those are often websites with lots of advertising, distractions and annoyances.<p>I enjoy using the web without invoking the &quot;complex&quot; website model.  Nearly 100% of websites look great in the text-only browser, meaning I can read all the text and glean the information conveyed.  For me, most &quot;complex&quot; websites can still be treated as if they were &quot;simple&quot; websites without losing information.  When I visit example.com, I only request index.html from example.com.  Nothing more.  I do not make additional connections to third party domains, and, as such, there are no &quot;blocking&quot; problems to worry about.<p>HTTP&#x2F;3 may be optimised for certain types of websites, i.e., complex ones, and a certain type of web usage, i.e., consumption of &quot;complex&quot; websites that include third party &quot;content&quot; and&#x2F;or hidden elements.  The biggest push for &quot;HTTP&#x2F;3&#x2F;&quot; comes from companies with vested interests in &quot;complex&quot; websites, the proliferation of online advertising and the attraction of &quot;eyeballs&quot;.<p>HTTP&#x2F;1.1 feels less corporate, from a time before Google et al.&#x27;s takeover of the web.<p>I do like the idea of QUIC (though I do no think Google was the first to implement the idea of reliable transmission over UDP), and I look forward to potentially using other (less web browser-centric, advertising-oriented) protocols over QUIC &quot;connections&quot;.