HTTP has remained more or less the same since it was released back in 1999 but that’s all about to change. After several years in development, HTTP/2 has finally been approved and is one step closer to being published as a standard, although this could take several months to actually happen. Not many people will even be aware of this but it’s really, REALLY big news for the Internet. 

Today, the next major version of HTTP took a big step toward becoming a reality; it’s been officially finalized and now moves towards being fully standardized. According to a blog by Mark Nottingham, the chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group, the standard was completed today and is on its way to the RFC Editor to go through editorial processes before being published as a standard. HTTP/2 is a huge deal; it’s the next big version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, marking the largest change since 1999 when HTTP 1.1 was adopted. The new standard brings a number of benefits to one of the Web’s core technologies, such as faster page loads, longer-lived connections, more items arriving sooner and server push. HTTP/2 uses the same HTTP APIs that developers are familiar with, but offers a number of new features they can adopt.