HTTP-over-QUIC will be officially renamed to HTTP/3

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The protocol called HTTP-over-QUIC will be officially renamed to HTTP/3. In a discussion on IETF mail archive thread, Mark Nottingham, Chairman of the IETF HTTPBIS Working Group and W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group, triggered the confusion between QUIC-the-transport-protocol, and QUIC-the-HTTP-binding.

QUIC, a TCP replacement done over UDP, was started as an effort by Google and then more of a “HTTP/2-encrypted-over-UDP” protocol. The QUIC Working Group in the IETF works on creating the QUIC transport protocol.

According to Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of curl at Mozilla, “When the work took off in the IETF to standardize the protocol, it was split up in two layers: the transport and the HTTP parts. The idea being that this transport protocol can be used to transfer other data too and it’s not just done explicitly for HTTP or HTTP-like protocols. But the name was still QUIC.”

People in the community have referred different versions of the protocol using informal names such as iQUIC and gQUIC to separate the QUIC protocols from IETF and Google. The protocol that sends HTTP over “iQUIC” was called “hq” (HTTP-over-QUIC) for a long time.

Last week, on November 7, 2018, Dmitri Tikhonov, a programmer at Litespeed announced that his company and Facebook had successfully done the first interop ever between two HTTP/3 implementations.

Here’s Mike Bihop’s follow-up presentation at the HTTPbis session on the topic.