--- title: A seachange in front-end best practice (but not for a while) description: 'Despite some reservations, it looks like HTTP/2 is very definitely the future of the Internet. Speed improvements HTTP/2 may not be the perfect standard, but it will bring with it many long-awaited speed improvements to internet communication: Sending of many different resources in the first response Multiplexing requests to prevent block […]' url: https://canonical.com/blog/a-seachange-in-front-end-best-practice-but-not-for-a-while?format=md --- 1. [Blog](https://canonical.com/blog) 2. Article --- [Robin Winslow](https://canonical.com/blog/author/nottrobin "More about Robin Winslow") 11 March 2015 # A seachange in front-end best practice (but not for a while) [Design](https://canonical.com/blog/tag/design) [developers](https://canonical.com/blog/tag/developers) [front-end](https://canonical.com/blog/tag/front-end) [web](https://canonical.com/blog/tag/web) --- Share the article Despite [some reservations](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2716278), it looks like [HTTP/2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2) is very definitely the future of the Internet. ## Speed improvements HTTP/2 may not be the perfect standard, but it will bring with it many long-awaited speed improvements to internet communication: * Sending of many different resources in the first response * Multiplexing requests to prevent blocking * Header compression * Keep connections alive * Bi-directional communication ## Changes in long-held performance practices I read [a very informative post](https://mattwilcox.net/web-development/http2-for-front-end-web-developers) today (via [Web Operations Weekly](http://webopsweekly.com/)) which laid out all the ways this will change some deeply embedded performance principles for front-end developers. Namely: * [Combining CSS and Javascript](https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#num_http) into one file * [Image sprites](http://alistapart.com/article/sprites) (concatenation of images together in the same file) * Serving assets [from a cookie-less domain](http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/static-cookieless-domain/) * [Sharding](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/05/12/sharding-dominant-domains/) – serving assets from many different domains Each of these practices are hacks which make website setups more complex and more opaque, but with the goal of speeding up front-end performance by working around limitations in HTTP. Fortunately, these somewhat ugly practices are no longer necessary with HTTP/2. Importantly, Matt Wilcox points out that in an HTTP/2 world, these practices might actually slow down your website, for the following reasons: * If you serve concatenated CSS, Javascript or image files, it’s likely you’re sending more content than you strictly need to for each page * Serving assets from different domains prevents HTTP/2 from reusing existing connections, forcing it to open extra ones ## But not yet… This is all very exciting, but note that we can’t and shouldn’t start changing our practices *yet*. Even [server-side support for HTTP/2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2#HTTP.2FHTTPS_servers) is still patchy, with [nginx](http://nginx.org/) only promising full support by the end of 2015 (with Microsoft’s IIS, surprisingly, putting other servers to shame). But of course the main limiting factor will, as usual, be [browsers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2#Browser_support): * Firefox leads the way, with support since version 36 * Chrome has support for spdy4 (the precursor to HTTP/2), but it isn’t enabled by default yet * Internet Explorer 11 supports HTTP/2 only in Windows 10 beta As usual the main limiting factor will be waiting for [market share of older versions of Internet Explorer to drop off](http://www.theie9countdown.com/). Braver organisations may want to be progressive by deliberately slowing down the experience for people on older browsers to speed up the more up-to-date and hence push adoption of good technology. If you want to get really clever, you could serve a different website structure based on the user agent string, but this would really be a pain to implement and I doubt many people would want to do this. Even with the most progressive strategy, I doubt anyone will be brave enough to drop decent HTTP/1 performance until at least 2016, as this is when nginx support should land; Windows 10 and therefore IE 11 will have had some time to gain traction and of course Internet Explorer market share in general will have [continued to drop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#mediaviewer/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg) in favour of Chrome and Firefox. TL;DR: We front-end developers should be ready to change our ways, but we don’t need to worry about it just yet. Originally posted [on robinwinslow.co.uk](https://robinwinslow.co.uk/2015/03/05/a-seachange-in-front-end-best-practice/). [Get in touch Interested in running Ubuntu in your organization?](https://ubuntu.com/about/contact-us/form) ## Sign up for our newsletter Get the latest Canonical news and updates in your inbox. Work email: \*I agree to receive information about Canonical's products and services. By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to [Canonical's Privacy Policy](https://canonical.com/legal/dataprivacy). Sign up ## Share on --- ## Related posts [### Why web engineering is great](https://canonical.com/blog/why-web-engineering-is-great) Hi, I’m Johann! I’m an engineering manager in Canonical’s web team. For the larger part of my 15 years of work experience as engineer, I’ve been working in web development.... [Johann Wolf](https://canonical.com/blog/author/johannwolf) 27 April 2026 [### Introducing a VSCode extension for Vanilla CSS Framework](https://canonical.com/blog/introducing-a-vscode-extension-for-vanilla-css-framework) The Vanilla CSS Framework is a utility class-based and customizable SASS library that is the go-to when it comes to styling websites and dashboards across the majority of... 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