[Lennie]

I think Tor will get faster, now new protocols like TLS/1.3, HTTP/2 and QUIC are being developed.

Currently Tor looks like HTTPS done with TLS/1.2 on TCP (like regular HTTPS). As these newer protocols get more and more delpoyed Tor can start using them too which will help make Tor faster.

[dimator]

Those standards have nothing to do with Tor's speed.

[AlyssaRowan]

Not immediately, but I feel that as those protocols become more ubiquitous, _maybe_ the base Tor transport protocol (for nodes which aren't bridges) might be able to benefit from some of the same upgrades by using them?

I don't know how much (if at all) it might help—but other, similar overlay networks have previously noticed that (intuitively) inefficiency in the transport protocol is likely to be (broadly speaking) multiplied by the number of hops; so any improvements in that might be useful in improving the user experience by using the same available resources more efficiently.

What that might mean for Tor's perceived speed is a somewhat murky issue, as that's a function of the complex interaction of latency and bandwidth and crypto and routing overhead of all the involved nodes in a tunnel put together; which of course is also shared with other tunnels; not to mention it will _also_ be particularly affected by exit node outproxy bandwidth; _and_ any possible packet loss and delay caused by both incidental _and_ deliberate adverse network conditions…

[Hello71]

There are in fact some vague ideas floating around about using QUIC as a transport protocol for Tor. However, there is so much work to do and so few people that have the necessary skills (solid cryptography -- not at a "build the next AES" level, but "implement AES with no side channels" is already incredibly difficult -- plus low-level networking, C, and so on...) that in my view it is a minimum of 2-3 years from being mainstream available (look at how long HSv3 took).

[Ajedi32]

Tor circuits tend to be rather high latency, so anything that reduces the number of round trips needed for page loads is likely to have a significant impact on Tor's effective speed.

[jerheinze]

Well HTTP/2 is disabled in the Tor Browser (for now), and it has a positive impact on speed, so they do matter: https://bugs.torproject.org/14952