Have you heard? HTTP/2 is finally finished. That means that pretty soon webpages will load faster; connections will last longer; servers will respond to requests with more content. What’s not to like! But hold on a sec: What the heck is HTTP/2, again?
Put simply, HTTP/2 is a very overdue upgrade to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the basic protocol that handles connections between a web server and your browser. The original development of HTTP happened way back when Tim Berners Lee first imagined his World Wide Web project in the late 1980s. However the version of the protocol we currently use, HTTP/1.1, was officially introduced in 1999. Needless to say, the web has changed quite a bit in the past 15 years.