Sucuri += HTTP/2 — Announcing HTTP/2 Support

We are happy to announce that we are now offering HTTP/2 support to all clients using our Website Firewall (CloudProxy) product.

Our own site already supports HTTP/2 (including this blog) and we will be rolling out HTTP/2 to all account dashboards very soon. We have always supported SPDY (the HTTP/2 predecessor) and decided to upgrade to HTTP/2 now that it is stable and supported by most browsers.

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 is the second major version of of the HTTP protocol that has been in development for the last few years. It is based on SPDY (a protocol by Google) and provides many improvements over the old HTTP/1.x that most of the websites use today, specifically related to performance.

At a very high level, these are the main changes over HTTP/1.x:

• HTTP/2 is binary and more efficient to parse.
• HTTP/2 is fully multiplexed. It allows the client to use one connection for parallelism and performance.
• HTTP/2 header is compressed (HPACK) (much smaller).
• HTTP/2 allows the server to send resources to the client that have not be requested yet. Great for caching resources.

The latest releases of Firefox and Chrome already support HTTP/2 and Microsoft and Apple will be supporting it very soon.

HTTP/2 Performance

HTTP/2 really does what it says and improves performance significantly for most web sites. It is the future of the web and you can start to benefit from it already without having to re-compile your web servers or wait for your hosting company to do so.

If you are a client, just go to your dashboard under “Settings->Performance” and set HTTP/2 to “on”. If you do not see HTTP/2 on your end (just enable SPDY) and when it is ready for your account it will be automatically switched to HTTP/2.

Further reading on HTTP/2:

• https://www.ietf.org/blog/2015/02/http2-approved/
• https://http2.github.io/

It is great to be security focused, but providing great performance to sites at the same time is also a must!