Nightly versions of Firefox already have HTTP / 3 support by default

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Mozilla released a few days agoeu the next nightly versions of Firefox, that will form the basis of the launch of Firefox 72 they will begin to have initial support for the HTTP / 3 protocol. Given the by default this support for HTTP / 3 is disabled and required the activation by the user of the option «network.http.http3.enabled" in "about:config«.

HTTP / 3 standardizes the use of the QUIC protocol as a transport for HTTP / 2. The QUIC protocol was developed by Google as an alternative to TCP + TLS for the Web, the problems of a long setup time solution and TCP coordination compounds and the elimination of packet loss delays during data transmission.

HERE C is a plug-in to the UDP protocol that supports multiplexing of multiple connections and provides encryption methods equivalent to TLS / SSL. Inside Of the key features of QUIC, the following stand out:

  • High security, similar to TLS (In fact, QUIC provides the ability to use TLS over UDP).
  • Flow integrity control that prevents packet loss.
  • La ability to instantly establish a connection (0-RTT, in about 75% of cases, data can be transferred immediately after sending the connection setup packet) and ensure minimal delays between sending a request and receiving a response (RTT, Round trip time).
  • Do not use the same sequence number when forwarding a packet, which avoids ambiguity in the determination of received packets and eliminates waiting times.
  • Losing a packet affects the delivery of only the stream associated with it and does not stop the delivery of data in streams transmitted in parallel over the current connection.
  • Error correction tools that minimize delays due to retransmission of lost packets. The use of special packet-level error correction codes to reduce situations that require retransmission of lost packet data.
  • Cryptographic block boundaries are aligned with QUIC packet boundaries, reducing the effect of packet loss on decoding the content of subsequent packets.
  • No problems with blocking the TCP queue.
  • Support for connection identifier, which reduces the time to establish a reconnection for mobile clients;
  • Ability to connect advanced mechanisms to control connection overhead.
  • Using the technique of predicting the bandwidth in each direction to ensure optimal packet forwarding intensity, preventing it from reaching a state of congestion in which packet loss is observed.
  • Remarkable performance and performance gains over TCP. For video services like YouTube, QUIC showed a 30% reduction in re-buffering operations when watching videos.

Firefox HTTP / 3 support is based on the neqo project from Mozilla, which provides a client and server implementation for the QUIC protocol. The component code to support HTTP / 3 and QUIC is written in Rust.

To test the operation HTTP / 3 clients, several test sites were launched, most of which have not yet been properly opened in Firefox as HTTP / 3 is still in the draft specification stage and ultimately not standardized.

This new version of the protocol is already beginning to have tests and added support within some applications, as such is the case of that experimental support for HTTP/3 is already within Chrome and curl and for servers is available in module form for and a test server based on the quiche library (implementation of QUIC and HTTP / 3 in Cloudflare's Rust cloud).

Finally, the next version of Firefox 72 is expected to be releasedaccording to your schedule, since the release is scheduled for January 7 of next year.


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