HTTP2 Year In a Review

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HTTP/2 YEAR IN REVIEW
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2015 was a big year for HTTP/2, after three years
being drafted and revised it finally was
submitted as a proposed standard as RFC 7540.
This has resulted in a frenzy of product releases
and tools to help organizations transition to
HTTP/2. Below are some of the highlights. APPLE
ANNOUNCES SUPPORT In June at WWDC Apple quietly
announced support for HTTP/2. They were the last
major browser vendor to announce or release
support. With this announcement global browser
support is now at 70 according to
CanIUse.com. APACHE AND NGINX RELEASE SUPPORT
FOR HTTP/2 Two of the most popular web servers on
the market both released support for HTTP/2. In
September NGINX announced support and was soon
followed by Apache in October. Shortly after
NGINX support was released popular blogging
platform Wordpress released support as well as
CDN provider CloudFlare. LOADIMPACT LAUNCHES
SERVICE TO TEST PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS Want to
know what your sites performance will be like
when you switch to HTTP/2. The folks over at
LoadImpact have launched a site to provide an
approximation of the performance benefits of a
given URL. A RISE IN HTTPS URLS According to
HTTParchive.org the number of websites that are
now available via HTTPS increased from 14 to 24
between January 1st and December 15, 2015. Given
that all browsers are requiring HTTPS for HTTP/2
I am attributing this increase to
HTTP/2. GOOGLEBOT WILL SUPPORT HTTP/2 In
November, Google announced that the GoogleBot
will soon be crawling websites with HTTP/2. This
could give sites that support HTTP/2 a boost in
search rankings as page speed is a ranking factor
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HTTP/2 ADOPTION METRICS A group of researchers
from Telefonica Research, Case Western Reserve
University and Carnegie Mellon University have
launched a dashboard showing sites on the top 1
million Alexa sites that announce support,
partially support and truly support HTTP/2. The
chart below shows the increase in support over
the last year.
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HTTP/2 ADOPTION METRICS W3Techs captures metrics
on HTTP/2 adoption based on the top 10 million
websites as reported by Alexa. As of December 29,
2015 they report that 5.2 of all websites use
HTTP/2, considering the RFC was only finalized 6
months ago this is a pretty remarkable adoption
rate. For comparison it took SPDY until July of
this year to pass the 5 adoption
rate. Given the rapid adoption
rate of HTTP/2 in the first six months, coupled
with the fact that Chrome and Firefox will be
deprecating support for SPDY in 2016, I wouldnt
be surprised if next year the adoption rate for
HTTP/2 is above 25.
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