4 ms·

Isn't it interesting that even today, after Microsoft Research showed that pipelining could be almost as fast as SPDY and when activating it in Firefox is an ab

Isn't it interesting that even today, after Microsoft Research showed that pipelining could be almost as fast as SPDY and when activating it in Firefox is an about:config away, people still refuse to include it in any tests? Google never showed any results vs pipelining. They just said "head of line blocking bad" and "one TCP connection per user good" (for tracking) and people just ate it up without evidence because, I suppose, they viewed HTTP/2 as conceptually simpler and more elegant. Nevermind that HTTP/2 didn't address any criticism that PHK had... that's ok because Google was just going to do it anyway.

e12e 11y ago
If anyone else wants a bit of history on pipelining wrt Netscape/Firefox etc: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining And in particular (from links in the above): "Bug 264354 - Enable HTTP pipelining by default Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX" - in particular one of the last comments in the thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354#c65 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354#c65 And: "Bug 395838 - Remove HTTP pipelining pref from release builds Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395838 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395838 My general impression is that there were a few issues on Windows, in particular with "anti-virus software", and some problems with broken proxies -- as well as a handful of issues with hopelessly broken servers. Additionally, it appears SSL/TLS latency was never really considered (not explicitly stated, but there appear to be implications that on "fast networks" http is "fast enough" that pipelining makes little difference) -- in other words it does indeed appear that just enabling piplining as the web moved from plain http to TLS, would've sidestepped most of the need for HTTP/2...

e12e 11y ago

If anyone else wants a bit of history on pipelining wrt Netscape/Firefox etc: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining And in particular (from links in the above): "Bug 264354 - Enable HTTP pipelining by default Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX" - in particular one of the last comments in the thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354#c65 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354#c65 And: "Bug 395838 - Remove HTTP pipelining pref from release builds Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395838 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395838 My general impression is that there were a few issues on Windows, in particular with "anti-virus software", and some problems with broken proxies -- as well as a handful of issues with hopelessly broken servers. Additionally, it appears SSL/TLS latency was never really considered (not explicitly stated, but there appear to be implications that on "fast networks" http is "fast enough" that pipelining makes little difference) -- in other words it does indeed appear that just enabling piplining as the web moved from plain http to TLS, would've sidestepped most of the need for HTTP/2...