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

By John Callaham
last updated

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 (opens in new tab)

John Callaham
John Callaham
76 Comments
  • Excellent news!
  • Good to see Microsoft is exploring all their options... *bum bum tiss*
  • It actually goes 'Ba Dum Tiss...!' :P
  • Excellent.
  • I think its Ba bum tuss =D
  • I noticed that IE11 in windows 10 doesn't suck as much as in windows 8/8.1 and I want to use IE more since the sync feature is available which is the sole feature that make me go back to chrome everytime. Oh, extension are coming with IE12 so, fingers crossed.
  • How does IE11 suck? Fast, fluid... No problems unlike IE9 and previous. I think that IE is very good since IE10.
  • Maybe you have a super computer but for me it sucked (it's way better than the previous versions but still). Some websites won't display full content and sometimes it freezes and tabs crash unlike chrome or Firefox or even opera. The IE in windows 10 though is smoother and I'm using it more.
  • My IE11 has a hard time with scripts. ESPN.com is especially bad.
  • I obviously can only speak for myself, but every time I've sene a site hang in IE, I've opened it in Chrome and had the same issue. I blame the site programmers for doing something dumb.
  • Do you have hardware acceleration disabled? IE is noticeably smoother than Chrome on lower end hardware I've used.
  • Please don't tell me you have more than 2 browsers on your PC. Having more than 2 might slow down your PC
  • Only if you're running something with a three year old processor and less than four gb ram. I've got five browsers, with a whole bunch of dev tools, on a sp3 with 8gb ram and nothing "slows down". Equally a macbook air with four gb (and win 8.1) doesn't. All my other machines have a minimum of sixteen gb. Nothing. Fact is, IE has compatibility issues. Still. Hence why msft includes a compatibility view to try and force rendering. Of course sometimes system may just need to be upgraded but IE does have issues. Still. Of course, websites have to pick up the blame too.
  • On multiple computers I have issues with IE and scrolling with the mouse on many sites, wpcentral is one of them.  However, if the system has a touch interface it will scroll just fine.  So I guess it's not IE but an issue between mouse drivers and IE.
  • How we get rid of this issue, avou The scroll thing, and mouse not working properly... ??
  • Go into Internet Options and select the Advanced Settings tab. Uncheck "Enable Smooth Scrolling". I know...seems counterintuitive, but you'll thank me. I've been doing this since they introduced it sometime around IE5 or 6. I have it disabled for all of my users at work through Group Policy.
  • Seems faster.
  • You had to be this jerk. Don't you?
  • Lol
  • It is technically accurate, however.
  • Still he got point. It Must FASTER
  • Yep it'll definitely seem Faster haha
  • Hahaha
  • I was looking for this comment.
  • Great great great :D
  • good moves
  • So if this the case then web apps or html apps will be able to move at lightning speeds and server side task and processes will be even faster. Going to be really fun and might have more fun seeing web apps more than c# apps unless they are combined. Going to be interesting.
  • The tech talked about only affects the speed of the transmission of data across multiple requests between client and server, not of the processing speed on either end, so native and .NET apps will still have a large advantage over web scripts in terms of performance. And readability, and maintanability, and security, and so on...
  • So long as they can keep IE12 from crashing so often, I'll be happy. I have a very fast machine with 24GB of high speed RAM, and despite not getting anywhere near that limit, IE collapses when there are too many tabs open. I should be able to run as many instances or tabs within a session as my resources will allow, but it seems that the program is not written that way. Even on a single page, when scrolling down a history on a Tumblr page, the farther down I go, the more unresponsive IE becomes, until I eventually give up or it crashes. Also, a better built-in popup blocker is needed. Seriously, if I don't click on a link, don't open any new windows or tabs. It's that easy.
  • How do you even use 24GB of RAM in the first place?
  • Try building some large posters in Photoshop. PS just loves to eat RAM, however much you give it. Also, 3D modeling applications take their fair share, in addition to other resources when rendering. Another option I have is to run a RAMDisk, though I have yet to attempt this.
  • +Amiga 1200 :)
  • Running virtual machines....
  • 24GB ram is not much if you are using 3d modelling and video editing tools, they tend to use a lot of ram. i know some people who use 64GB in work
  • And music software. I have single instrument multisamples that can take over a gig each.
  • I guess you don't know that Technical PREVIEW is very early build.
  • I wasn't talking about the preview, I was talking about my experience with IE10 and IE11 on Windows 7 and 8 machines.
  • Is there's a reason they can't support HTTP/2 and SPDY? Even if HTTP/2 is the future, SPDY is used by quite a few sites at the moment.
  • Does this also means Cortana will be faster also since she likes to download the internet...
  • Installing Win10, can't wait to explore IE11's functions. Hope Sync, Search Filter, Ad Block etc are there.
  • adblock is there, from the same devs as for firefox and chrome i believe
  • That's odd that they're dropping support for SPDY too. A lot of servers are supporting SPDY. Why not support both?
  • Cos its proprietary Google. IETF are taking the main thrust of SPDY and making it a proper standard. SPDY sites will move to HTTP/2 There is no issue here
  • Yep, not good to have something that relies on Google (or any major company). Same reason that WebM and WebP haven't taken off: Google has a track record of offering something that seems really open and friendly, and then going Evil with it later. Heck, even Google has stopped developing it's SPDY module for Apache server.
    HTTP/2 is based on all the good principles of SPDY without the baggage.
  • hell yes, more speed please
  • Seems faster
  • Lol are people getting that impatient that they cant wait for 10 ms??? At this rate in the future fish will probably have a higher attention span than people... Lol...
  • Yes, web analytics can confirm that. Even the tiniest perception of speed loss can make a difference in typical user experience (remember "typical" still means little to lower-mid tier knowledge on how the internet works).
  • Haha :)
    Seems likely. Humans are too impatient
  • I guess its not the people they're talking about it is the SEO which matters. The websites will be ignored or pushed to the last in the search if their is a difference. And internally the website will have a latency which makes the user experience bad. I'm not sure, but that is what I think.
  • SPDY is Google's thing and MS will drop support for it. Seems legit. But is it already gone with this version of IE11 on the Tech Preview or it will be gone in a future release ?
  • Just tested it and it seems to be gone already. Facebook and Twitter no longer report as coming though via SPDY/3 in the network inspector. However most Google sites are already coming through as HTTP2.
  • Wow this might be the difference between many websites feeling unresponsive on load time that i cant scroll down until most elements load :| Cant wait till consumer preview!!
  • Funny, wpcentral.com and it's sister sites do this for me in IE. Sooo frustrating. :)
  • Yeah me too, causing me to use chrome not and more.
  • Use firefox instead of using chrome.. Never give a chance for Google.. Lol
  • + remove ads
  • So HTML/2 is faster than SPDY 3/4 ?
  • Yep.
  • I think I read that a lot of developers had left a suggestion in a Microsoft web site, asking to stop developing internet explorer, as it was a nightmare for them, I'm not a web developer, but, is IE really that bad?
  • Nope
  • In the past it had been incredibly difficult (relative), haven't done any web design in a few years though.
  • Please Microsoft confirm this all currently windows phone 8 device upgradable to windows 10
  • ie11 works smooth on my Dell 500
  • I have a lot of issues with ie11 it's slow to load and pages crash often. It's odd because I've seen it on others machines and it's fine. Chrome however is flawless so if it is something to do with my machine I have no idea what the problem is.
  • I have the exact opposite experiance.
  • Yeah, which is why it's weird because a lot of people tell me that but I'm just not seeing it. I want to, and I keep trying ie11 because of the praise that gets put on it, but I'm just not getting the best experience.
  • Not something that I care about internet is slow in Canada
  • That's exactly why you should care ...
  • Further Reading ... https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-tradeoffs/
  • IE 11 is the best browser yet !! Fast fluid and beautiful !! Better than chrome Firefox and safari
  • Excellent
  • Anything anyone can do to make pages load faster is something I will support.
  • Nice work...
  • Isn't it only supported on 1% of websites though? My biggest complaint is that IIS doesn't support it at least not in server 2008 R2. Add it to IIS and I'll be able to use it.
  • Amazing!!!