Microsoft: Windows 10 support for HTTP/2 in Internet Explorer will be a big help for websites

Microsoft has already announced that the version of Internet Explorer that is available in the Windows 10 Technical Preview supports the HTTP/2, but in a new blog post today, the company says that is actually huge news for websites; especially the developers who make them and the busniness that depend on them for revenue.

Microsoft says that even a small amount of a delay in loading a website can have massive consequences for the people who need them to load faster. It states:

"For instance a Bing study found that a 10ms increase in page load time costs the site $250K in revenue annually; a 100ms increase – that's a third the speed of the blink of the human eye, mind you – undid three months of work that went into improving user engagement via better search results relevance. That 100ms delay in the responsiveness of a transactional web page has been shown to cost big online retailers up to 1% of sales due to search abandonment."

While Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 supported the SPDY 3.0 protocol in IE11, Microsoft has now decided to end their support for SPDY in favor of HTTP/2. It states:

"HTTP/2 delivers the Web page elements quicker and more efficiently, taking advantage of all the available bandwidth. With long-lived connections and multiplexing (the protocol's ability to combine multiple requests on one connection), more web page items arrive sooner. Experimental HTTP/2 features such as server push and request dependencies could further improve web performance in the future."

Microsoft offers some instructions on how web designers and owners can go ahead and get their sites ready for HTTP/2 by downloading the Windows 10 Technical Preview and using its developer tools. It also supports server support as well. Do you support Microsoft's push for the HTTP/2 protocol?

Source: Microsoft

John Callaham