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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

> While HTTP/3 specification is still in the draft stage, the latest version of the Chrome browser already supports it by default

This is awful, because it means the spec review process does not have the impact that it can have, and Chrome gets to single-handedly define what they want the spec to be

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Chrome has supported draft versions for the past few years already. The current spec is considered to be basically final and there are no more expected backwards compatibility breaks. Seems useful to get some widespread real-world experience in case there is actually something unexpected at a large scale.

That's simply false. Chrome introduced QUIC long before the standardization process, did IETF just take it wholesale? No. Look up "ietf quic vs google quic". Same here.

Correct. Furthermore, the motto of the IETF is "Rough consensus and running code". Someone needs to go ahead and implement specs while they're still in draft stage so people can actually use it, benchmark it and in some cases figure out problems that no committee of IETF engineers would have been able to predict.

Well, these kinds of technologies need to be tested at scale before being adopted. On the other hand, SPDY (HTTP/2) was given the same treatment and instead of fixing its issues / scrapping it entirely, we ended up with HTTP/3 a few years later.

SPDY was very similar but incompatible with HTTP/2, scrapping it for a better option was a good move, IMO (HTTP/2 is still alive and well in Chrome).

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