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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I expect HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 will still be with us for decades; orgs that block UDP will be able to continue to do so, and the rare HTTP/3-only website will just be inaccessible.

Even if there's a new killer app that requires QUIC, I imagine an org backward enough to disallow UDP will just not care about that app.

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I expect HTTP/2 to disappear completely, to the point of browsers removing support for it probably even within a decade. Everything that works over HTTP/2 should work over HTTP/1.1, even if at a slight cost, and HTTP/3 should be uniformly superior to HTTP/2, except in those rare cases of UDP-blocking firewalls, which situation I expect to improve over time. Given the complexity and maintenance burden of the protocol and more importantly the upgrade mechanism, I think browsers will be happy to remove HTTP/2 in favour of the old reliable HTTP/1.1 (which is certainly not going anywhere) and HTTP/3 once they see very little using it any more, and absolutely nothing needing to use it.

I should also write a dissenting opinion on this point—for each client, the upgrade to HTTP/2 is free, as it’s negotiated via ALPN during the TLS handshake; whereas the HTTP/3 upgrade mechanism isn’t particularly solid yet, requiring an Alt-Svc header on a response from the server, meaning you’ve already had to connect over HTTP/1 or HTTP/2 before you learn you can connect over HTTP/3. There’s also work going on to add a new type of DNS record to indicate that the server is h3-capable, which would allow you to connect over HTTP/3 immediately, but that’s opt-in, and loads of sites that support HTTP/3 will never add that record. So until browsers switch to defaulting to trying HTTP/3, HTTP-over-TCP will continue to be used regularly even when HTTP-over-QUIC is supported, and that means plenty of HTTP/2 will be used until that time. This could keep HTTP/2 alive for a lot longer than the decade I posited. I don’t know how it’ll play out, but I think it will depend on how much browsers decide they want to push HTTP/3; if they push it hard and try it more optimistically, HTTP/2 will die more quickly.

"Science progresses one funeral at a time."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

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