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by geofft 4122 days ago
Sure, but as long as I'm supporting a good chunk of HTTP/1.1 users, then I don't get the benefits of the HTTP/2 architecture, right?

I could buy that what I should do is wait a few years, until the majority of my users are HTTP/2 instead of HTTP/1.1, and then optimize everything for HTTP/2 and still work (slowly) on HTTP/1.1. But at the moment it's not clear why I should care: my options seem to be really fast on HTTP/2 and really slow on HTTP/1.1, or kinda fast on HTTP/2 and kinda fast on HTTP/1.1.
1 comments
jomohke 4122 days ago
You'll still see performance benefits of HTTP2 while supporting HTTP/1.1 content.

HTTP2 requests have (sometimes significantly[1]) less overhead, and most sites following good HTTP/1.1 practices still make many requests.

Open the network panel in your browser and view a few large sites. Despite minimizing requests with sprites, concatenation etc, most still make dozens of requests, with some large sites pushing over a hundred.

(for example, I just loaded a page for a single tweet on Twitter and it involved twenty requests, with a size over 2MB.)

I think your list of options are incorrect:

- You can optimize for HTTP/1.1 and it will be fast over both protocols.

- Or don't optimize, and it will be fast over HTTP2 and slow over HTTP/1.1. The main benefit is saving development time & complexity. This will not be a worthy tradeoff until HTTP2 is more widespread among your users.

[1] The reduction in latency can be massive, for instance, as the HTTP2 server can push resources immediately without waiting for the browser to request them.

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geofft 4122 days ago
Sure, there's still an advantage for the user to upgrade to HTTP/2. But it sounds like I shouldn't be particularly optimizing for HTTP/2 quite yet? That's what I'm interested in: I'm not usually a web developer so I don't pay close attention, but I'd like to know how to design websites that aren't bad in general.

It sounds like I'm currently best off designing for HTTP/1.1 (with all the usual hacks) and knowing that HTTP/2 will perhaps make things better, instead of designing in any way for HTTP/2, which will make things worse for HTTP/1.1. That seems to be not what this article is saying.

Should I be caring about designing for HTTP/2 yet, or should I just ignore it for a few years?

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