Enabling HTTP / 3 support in Firefox is scheduled for end of May

Mozilla reported About the intention to start the phased inclusion of HTTP / 3 and QUIC protocols in the release of Firefox 88, scheduled for April 19 (initially, the release was expected on April 20, but judging by Graphic , shifted for one day). Initially, HTTP / 3 support will be activated only for a small percentage of users and, if there are no unforeseen problems, will be brought to all by the end of May. In the night assemblies and beta versions http / 3 was enabled by default at the end of March.

Recall that the implementation of http / 3 in Firefox is based on a developed company Mozilla project Neqo , providing customer sales and server for QUIC protocol . Component code to support HTTP / 3 and QUIC is written in RUST.
To control the inclusion of HTTP / 3 in About: Config, the option “Network.http.http3.Enabled” is provided. From the client software for experimental support, HTTP / 3 is also added to Chrome and CURL, and for servers is available in NGINX, as well as in the nginx modules and Test server from CloudFlare company. On the side of the sites, HTTP / 3 support is already provided on Google and Facebook servers.

http / 3 protocol is still at the black specification and finally not standardized in IETF . To use HTTP / 3 requires support on the client side and server of the same version of the QUIC and HTTP / 3 black standard, which is indicated in the alt -SVC (Firefox supports draft specifications from 27 to 32).

http / 3 defines the use of the QUIC protocol as transport for HTTP / 2. Protocol Quic (Quick UDP Internet Connections) C 2013 has been developing by Google as an alternative to TCP + TLS bond for WEB, solving problems with Large time of installation and coordination of connections in TCP and eliminating the delay in loss of packets during data transfer. QUIC is an add-in over UDP protocol that supports multiplexing multiple connections and providing encryption methods equivalent to TLS / SSL. In the process of developing in IETF standard, changes were made to the protocol, which led to the emergence of two parallel branches, one for HTTP / 3, and the second supported Google (Chrome supports both options).

Basic Features Quic:

  • High security similar to TLS (essentially QUIC provides the ability to use TLS over UDP);
  • Monitoring the integrity of the stream preventing packet loss;

/Media reports.