Internet Explorer to support new HTTP/2 protocol in Win10

The Internet Explorer web browser in Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 operating system will support the new performance-oriented HTTP/2 protocol, the company said today.

As the world wide web has evolved and moved beyond simple browsing of context, user complaints about slow-loading websites have become common, a problem that HTTP/2 seeks to address with several "on the wire" network improvements.

HTTP/2 aims to reduce perceived lag for end-users when loading websites while at the same time maintaining the methods, status codes and semantics of the existing hyper text transfer protocol version 1.1, which is 15 years old.

Based on Google/s SPDY protocol and developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force's HTTPbis working group, HTTP/2 also aims to reduce network and server loading - the new website data communications protocol is binary and not text-based, as well as fully multiplexed, making it more efficient for browsers to parse.

Along with header compression, the changes in HTTP/2 are aimed speeding up page loads and preventing requests having to be served in order and becoming blocked.

Currently web browsers open many Transmission Control Protocol data connections. HTTPbis said it can be more than 30 a page as sites use multiple origins for the data served.

This behaviour can create congestion and retransmissions of data, and HTTP/2 aims to pare down the number of connections to just one.

The new protocol is also of interest for developers of web apps.

HTTPbis notes that early feedback for application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based app also shows performance improvements as HTTP/2 reduces request overheads.