HTTP/2 Has Been Finalized

And boy did we have to wait.

Back in 1999, the IETF and W3C have finalized the HTTP/1.1 protocol and now, 16 years later, it looks like the IETF HTTP Working Group has finally announced the work on HTTP/2 is now complete and it’s on the way to be published as a standard.

Why is HTTP/2 such a big deal? Well, as you might expect from 16 years of progress, it does bring faster page load times, longer lived connections, ability to deliver tons of requests at the same time thanks to the multiplexing feature, which means that the rest of the page load won’t be blocked by some of the heavier items.

It’s should be noted that the new standard is based on Google’s own SPDY protocol, which Google plans to drop and switch to HTTP/2 in the early 2016.

[Via: TNW]