[StefanKarpinski]

This attitude is exactly how you make sure that nothing ever changes or improves. It is "the perfect is the enemy of the good" exemplified. HTTP/2 is a huge improvement over HTTP in many very important ways. True, it's not perfect, but guess what? 2 is not the last version number out there. We can switch to HTTP/2 now and fix the rest of the problems with HTTP/3.

Moreover, it seems like we are collectively getting better at upgrading technologies: IPv6 adoption has finally got some momentum; HTTP/2 is actually happening. With lessons learned from the HTTP => HTTP/2 transition, HTTP/3 could happen in five years instead of in another fifteen.

[zzzcpan]

> This attitude is exactly how you make sure that nothing ever changes or improves.

On the contrary, we are in a desperate need of such attitudes in software. We need for everyone to stop jumping to every new thing with silly promises. We need to start choosing quality over quantity. We need substantial well researched improvements.

[adventured]

I think you're confusing quantity as being the end result. The quantity is about experimentation. The quality comes as the winning products are refined over time; the low quality products never gain mass traction and are discarded. That's exactly how it should work. These things are complimentary, not mutually exclusive.

That process is how innovation happens quickly. It's also how you frequently discover new things you weren't looking for, which is how a lot of innovation happens (by accident). Rapid iteration is in nearly all cases vastly superior to turtle-speed iteration.

[icebraining]

Playing Devil's advocate, wasn't SPDY the experimentation part? Why the need for HTTP/2?

[donatj]

"Low quality products never gain mass traction and are discarded" Yet we're still kicking IPv6

[striking]

I appreciate your optimism, but do realize that there isn't really a massive improvement unless you're Google. I don't see this as worthy of the "/2" suffix; Google might like it because it allows them to make their tech standard, but other than that it's unnecessary marketing.

HTTP has never been the bottleneck. I think IPv6 is excellent and a needed, massive improvement especially since IPv4 is no longer tenable. HTTP/1.1, however, still works quite well and keeps a larger feature set in some circumstances. It's less insane because it's not made by W3C or IETF or any other hugely bureaucratic group; however, that doesn't mean it's better either.

I can't wait for HTTP/3! Hopefully this time they won't rush it.

[enneff]

Check this out https://http2.golang.org/gophertiles and tell me that HTTP isn't the bottleneck, especially for high-latency connections. This is going to make the web so much faster.

[MichaelGG]

On some small sites I've worked on, switching to SPDY shaved about 20-30% off our load times. And all we had to do was type " SPDY" into our nginx.conf. That's like the definition of a win.