[jomohke]

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.

[geofft]

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?