Cloudflare, Google Chrome, and Firefox add HTTP/3 support

[Brink]

During last year’s Birthday Week we announced preliminary support for QUIC and HTTP/3 (or “HTTP over QUIC” as it was known back then), the new standard for the web, enabling faster, more reliable, and more secure connections to web endpoints like websites and APIs. We also let our customers join a waiting list to try QUIC and HTTP/3 as soon as they became available.

Since then, we’ve been working with industry peers through the Internet Engineering Task Force, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, to iterate on the HTTP/3 and QUIC standards documents. In parallel with the standards maturing, we’ve also worked on improving support on our network.

We are now happy to announce that QUIC and HTTP/3 support is available on the Cloudflare edge network. We’re excited to be joined in this announcement by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, two of the leading browser vendors and partners in our effort to make the web faster and more reliable for all.

In the words of Ryan Hamilton, Staff Software Engineer at Google, “HTTP/3 should make the web better for everyone. The Chrome and Cloudflare teams have worked together closely to bring HTTP/3 and QUIC from nascent standards to widely adopted technologies for improving the web. Strong partnership between industry leaders is what makes Internet standards innovations possible, and we look forward to our continued work together.”

What does this mean for you, a Cloudflare customer who uses our services and edge network to make your web presence faster and more secure? Once HTTP/3 support is enabled for your domain in the Cloudflare dashboard, your customers can interact with your websites and APIs using HTTP/3. We’ve been steadily inviting customers on our HTTP/3 waiting list to turn on the feature (so keep an eye out for an email from us), and in the coming weeks we’ll make the feature available to everyone.

What does this announcement mean if you’re a user of the Internet interacting with sites and APIs through a browser and other clients? Starting today, you can use Chrome Canary to interact with Cloudflare and other servers over HTTP/3. For those of you looking for a command line client, curl also provides support for HTTP/3. Instructions for using Chrome and curl with HTTP/3 follow later in this post...

Read more:

• HTTP/3: the past, the present, and the future
• Cloudflare, Google Chrome, and Firefox add HTTP/3 support | ZDNet

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[ShadouFox]

Bringing this all together: today is a good day for Internet users; widespread rollout of HTTP/3 will mean a faster web experience for all, and today’s support is a large step toward that.

I have quite a few reservations about this. I don't trust Googol or its Chrome browser. I quit using Firefox after Mozilla became essentially Googol's bitch, and Firefox essentially a Chrome clone. This looks all too much like Googol's attempted highjacking of the 'Net. If you think privacy is an issue now, just wait...

 

[file3456]

I wouldn't be so QUIC to dawn the gold plated tin foil hat just yet. HTTP/3 is going to be the standard going forward and it's just that CloudFlare (a reverse proxy and CDN for websites) has rolled out the feature that can be on/off via your CloudFlare Dashboard should an Admin wish to allow it for their users.

I use CloudFlare myself, and if I can help speed up a user's connection then I'll turn it on. Of course it will only work with a browser that has HTTP/3 capability. As of now, it's the two main browsers and perhaps Safari. Not sure. But eventually all browsers whether niche or not will use HTTP/3. If not, you're left in the Internet dust to rot away.

Now don't get me wrong. Google and Mozilla can suck it and I do use Pale Moon as my main browser. So hopefully PM will be updated to use HTTP/3. If not, and if I see some asinine post about privacy/security I'm going to be pissed. I really don't think HTTP/3 has any privacy concerns. It's just the next step up from HTTP/2 that is in use now.

Here's some basic information from Wikipedia. No mention of any privacy issues as of yet. HTTP/3 - Wikipedia