HTTP/2 is approved and here’s what you need to know about it

The IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) has approved a proposal to speed up the web. This was made known in a statement published in a blogspot yesterday. HTTP/2 when eventually implemented will speed up page openings and enhance encryption. With this approval, the standard will now go on to be edited before full application.

According to the BBC, in another blogpost, written in January last year, Mr Nottingham – who chairs the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) HTTP working group – wrote about the proposed benefits of HTTP/2.

Instead of trying to reinvent the protocol, he said that the group was seeking to make the new one compatible with the old.

“Making HTTP/2 succeed means that it has to work with the existing web. So this effort is about getting the HTTP we know on the wire in a better way,” he wrote then.

Hypertext transfer protocol – HTTP – is the means by which browsers communicate with servers to render pages.

The new version, Mr Nottingham wrote, would make it easier to use the web’s encryption technologies, encouraging more websites to do so.