In its so-called edge network, customers of the network service provider Cloudflare can use HTTP / 3 in the future, as the provider announces in a detailed announcement. Customers can easily enable this in their own domain dashboard, so access to the web pages or web APIs should be easily available via HTTP / 3. So far, Cloudflare uses a waiting list for this, but the function should soon be generally available.

In the announcement, Cloudflare explicitly emphasizes the collaboration on the new protocol with the browser teams of Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. The Quic transport protocol and the HTTP / 3 based on it have been standardized for years within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

In order for the new protocols to be widely used, both servers and clients must support them. That’s exactly what Cloudflare has worked closely with Google and Mozilla. Recent Canary versions of Chrome support HTTP / 3 via the command line option –enable-quic –quic-version = h3-23. The Nightly versions of the Firefox are also to support HTTP / 3 and the download and transfer tool Curl already supports HTTP / 3.

In HTTP / 3 is originally created in the IETF as HTTP over Quic protocol. The IETF had taken over Google’s work on Quic for its own standardization. In contrast to the original idea, the IETF Quic has been split into a transport protocol and layers above it. HTTP / 3 takes over many of the new features of HTTP / 2, but also contains some changes due to the Quic basis, which made a new version of the protocol necessary.

Via | Cloudflare