Are we ready for HTTP/2?
First let me start off with the following:
1. This post does not reflect the views of my employer.
2. I am not anti-HTTP/2 or SSL, this is strictly an observation (with questions).
3. This isn’t a knock at anyone in the #WebPerf community.
Chrome support for SPDY/3.1 EOL date is set, making HTTP/2 (H/2) the new must-have hypertext protocol. Or is it? I asked the Twitterverse:
You might be thinking “83 votes!? Klout score of 50? Get out of here!”
For those who are thinking something along these lines, hear me out. I checked to see who in the Alexa Top 10 (USA) has H/2 enabled and was surprised to see only 50% do:
It gets better (I think?). Best practice for H/2 is to avoid the following HTTP/1.1 performance optimizations made popular by Steve Souders:
1. Sprites
2. Domain Sharding
3. Inline CSS
4. Inline JS
5. Concatenating CSS/JS (not measured below)
With the same 10 domains above I looked at the ones with H/2 enabled to see who was following best practices. Here’s what I discovered:
I know there are exceptions to every rule but WTF YouTube?
My friend Oisin brought up a good point: “I think the answer is “No” everyone just waits until Google starts to penalize SEO or it becomes de facto.”
So what do you think? Are we ready for HTTP/2?
Thanks to Robert Gibb, Oisin O’Connor & Josh Mervine for reviewing this post.
