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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Growing from 0 to ~27% of traffic in 2 years is great, but the graph from TFA shows that it was not a gradual increase but rather two big jumps in adoption:

- One in mid 2021, to ~20%.

- A second one in July 2022, to ~29%.

Since then the traffic share has been pretty flat. I don't think that counts as "eating the world" at all tbh.

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Is the graph showing the number of requests served by HTTP/3, or the number of individual hosts that support it? I believe it's the former, and it's explainable by the fact that most people these days visit only the same handful of siloes: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube probably make 90+% of all anonymised requests seen by Mozilla. But I doubt even 20% of global webservers are HTTP/2 ready, let alone HTTP/3.

So HTTP/3 is eating the world, if by world you only count FAANG websites, which sadly seems to be the case.

Remains to be seen how many websites are hidden behind tech's favorite MITM, Cloudflare, which might make figures a little harder to discern.

Right, and those big jumps are more to do with large Cloud providers or proxy providers switching it on, and less to do with web applications themselves switching it on.

It's great that the upgrade path for the end clients is so easy, but it doesn't reflect that the environment for web application developers has shifted towards HTTP/3

July 2022 maybe linked to cloudfront supporting it https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-http-3-support-for-amaz...

Intetestingly (or rather not surprising at all?) http3 is eating away the http2 traffic, while http1 just stays on a very slow decline.

Since http1 webservers are usually stuck there for a (more or less) good reason, they won't be converting to http3 anytime soon, while already more modern webservers are easier to upgrade from http2 to 3.

> Intetestingly (or rather not surprising at all?) http3 is eating away the http2 traffic, while http1 just stays on a very slow decline.

HTTP1: the OG, meant for a much smaller individual scale. So great even today for smaller websites. Where smaller right now, with modern hardware, can actually still mean hundreds of requests per second and millions per day...

HTTP2/HTTP3: BigCorp optimization primarily for problems they're facing and not that many others are.

So viewed through this lens it's clear what's happening.

BigCorps are just moving from HTTP2 to HTTP3 and mom and pops don't give a crap, HTTP1 is good enough.

HTTP2 is useful even if you just want to show multiple images on a page. For HTTP1 you have to add all of your images to a sprite sheet to avoid sending a lot of requests.

There's a cookie I took out of a package for a nibble. You could say I'm eating that pack of cookies. Not justifying the sensationalist title though.

Let me guess, the first jump was Chrome rolling out QUIC support of Google properties, the second was Firefox following suit?

Apache2 still doesn't support HTTP/3 (though I hear nginx recently added it). So yeah, the increasing adoption numbers seem to be major websites like Google and YouTube, and major CDNs like Cloudflare and Cloudfront.

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