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Comment by f2f | Hacker News Reader

> Bandwidth is cheap.

and the speed of light is constant. http1 has issues accessing all available bandwidth, and speed of light ensures that with a limited bandwidth your page load times will suffer. you don't go to web pages that take forever to load. nobody does.

the bandwidth argument is not the argument you should be making. you should be making the argument that today's pages are bloated and we need to work on reducing page/image size. that is being worked on too.

everybody willing to diff http1 and http2 should just take a look at this with a modern browser and imagine it in a standard site context (bigger images, many more site elements):

https://http2.golang.org/gophertiles

http://http2.golang.org/gophertiles

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I think you are replying to the wrong comment here, I did not make the argument that bandwidth was a major consideration, my point is that it isn't.

Latency != bandwidth.

Installing ghostery will do more for your page load times than http2 will.

> Latency != bandwidth.

yes, and you're conflating the two.

From kjksf's comment above:

"That's a lot of http connections which adds up to a lot of bandwidth and time savings."

I was only addressing the 'bandwidth' part.

The latency bit (which is partially addressed by running multiple concurrent connections via a single socket) is a different issue, for which we also already have multiple solutions (for one, stop making a few hundred requests for a page).

> for one, stop making a few hundred requests for a page

Telling the world "you're doing it wrong" is not a pragmatic solution. HTTP/2 exists to improve the web as it exists today. In this, it demonstrably succeeds.

For the same reason Javascript will remain the assembly language of the web, so too will HTTP/1.1 semantics likely persist forever. It's not because it's what we want but because there is no (yet) known transition away from it. HTTP/2 doesn't replace HTTP/1.1. It just deprecates a horrible wire format and adds some other features.

> Latency != bandwidth

No, but latency has a linear relationship with throughput

Test at page at 1Mbps thorough 10Mbps and 25ms RTT and watch how small the performance gains are above 5Mbps, then do the same with 10 to 200ms RTT and 10Mbps and watch performance dive.

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