HTTP/2 is replacing HTTP/1
Http/2 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol 2) is a relatively new Internet binary protocol that is fast becoming the new standard. What’s the benefit for us end users? –It allows greater data compression, takes less bandwidth and enhances security. More specifically, it allows browsers to make multiple http request/response messages at the same time, a big improvement over Http/1, which has been limited to processing messages consecutively since its introduction in 1999.
Unless you’re a techie who ‘looks under the hood,’ this transition is invisible and seamless. Already supported by Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer 11, Safari and Amazon Silk browsers, it’s surprising that this development has received so little attention. If you do a Google search for http/2, you’ll find only three pages of listings.
Be aware that some sites require you enable http/2 manually. A few examples–
“To enable http/2 on Chrome, use Google Chrome Canary and/or go to chrome://flags/#enable-spdy4 to enable SPDY/4 (Chrome’s name for http/ 2). To enable http/2 on Firefox, use Firefox Nightly or go to about: config and enable “network.http.spdy.enabled.http2”.
Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) replaces IPv4
Thanks to IPv6, the Internet is now able to handle trillions and trillions more computers and portable devices. This ongoing, invisible transition is critically important because the old Internet IPv4/Ipv5 architecture was about to max out at 4.3 billion IP addresses. Because the number of digital devices surpassed that several years ago, it was ready to burst at the seams. Another cyber apocalypse avoided!
What accounts for this exponential increase in capacity? An old IPv4 Internet address was ten spaces long, e.g.–164.0.1.2. By comparison, a new IPv6 address contains over 40 spaces, e.g. — 3050:1cf4: 52b8:0000:0000: 2c7e:0940:3115. Like the imperceptible transition to Http/2, it will take several more years for IPOv6 to be fully implemented.
What you need to do–
- When you sign on to an ISP or buy a new router for home or business, make sure they accommodate IPv6. Some ISPs and cheaper routers don’t.
Over 1000 New options–
- Finally, you’ve probably heard about over 1K new domain suffixes that began to roll out in January, made possible by the recent expansion of Internet capacity. If you want to add some color to your Digital presence, consider adding .gripe, .fail or .sucks and other domains. Or, maybe not…
