New Cloudflare features HTTP/3

[robi]

From their email:

We are excited to let you know that we will enable support for HTTP/3 in the upcoming month on one or more of your websites that use Cloudflare’s free plan. HTTP/3 is the latest version of HTTP, the protocol that your browser uses to talk to webservers (and Cloudflare!) Cloudflare is committed to pushing this new protocol forward, in our mission to help build a better Internet.

There is no action required on your end.

What will change on my website?
After HTTP/3 support is enabled, end users will be able to visit your website using the new protocol. This will not affect how your website is rendered or what your users see. As browsers start enabling support for HTTP/3, more traffic from users to Cloudflare will start flowing over this new protocol. Traffic to your origins will not be affected and you do not need to support HTTP/3 on your origin. We will only enable HTTP/3 on websites using our free plan. Websites on the Pro, Business or Enterprise plans will not be included in this change.

Why are you rolling out HTTP/3?
HTTP/3 is the newest version of the HTTP protocol. It enables faster, more reliable, and more secure connections to web endpoints like websites and APIs. In particular, data transfer of multiple files at the same time (which your browser does whenever it’s loading a website) on lossy connections and connection startup are improved.

When will this happen?
We will start enabling HTTP/3 on websites using the free Cloudflare plan over the next few weeks.

Will this break my site?
No. HTTP/3 has been available for almost a year and has been very thoroughly tested by thousands of our customers. We do not foresee any issues arising from enabling HTTP/3.

Any questions about HTTP/3 can be posted on the Cloudflare Community under the #http3 topic. Cloudflare MVPs and Team members will be watching this topic and respond to your questions accordingly.

What if I don’t want HTTP/3 enabled on my website?
HTTP/3 should not impact the performance of your website. If, for whatever reason, you do want to disable it after it is automatically enabled, you may go to the Network tab on the Cloudflare dashboard and toggle it off.

More information can be found on our developers documentation.

[Lonkle]

That protocol won't require any changes on Cloudron will it? It's a "browser-level" feature that will connect to Cloudflare's "server level" level feature right? Or do we have to do something in between to enable it?

[girish]

I think web servers (nginx, apache) will need configuration to support it. At this point, nginx only has some pre-release and apache has no support yet.

The announcement from Cloudflare is really for cloudflare customers. It means if you proxy via cloudflare then browser <-> cloudflare will be http3. If you don't use Cloudflare proxying, it won't be used, despite your browser settings.

[Lonkle]

@girish But one day in the feature we could use those updated web servers to connect via HTTP3 directly (without passing through Cloudflare). Until then, Cloudflare's unique reverse proxy thing will allow us to connect our sites via HTTP3?

[girish]

@Lonk Yup, that sounds right. In fact, it seems that Cloudflare made the nginx+http3 patch (but not sure if nginx itself ended up using that).