This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Sreekanth Kuruba
🚀 Networking for DevOps & SRE – 2025 Edition • Part 2/10
Most teams think they’ve already moved to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.
But when we checked real production traffic in 2025, the truth was surprising:
We pulled protocol stats from our CDN + load balancer logs...
63% of all requests were still hitting us over HTTP/1.1 — mostly from corporate proxies, middleboxes, and legacy devices.
That means 2 out of every 3 requests were paying an unnecessary 150–300ms latency tax just because outdated protocols were still in the path.
The Web’s 2025 Protocol Reality Check
All three versions move data between browser and backend.
But how they do it — TCP vs multiplexing vs QUIC — creates massive differences in:
- Page load speed
- API latency
- Core Web Vitals
- CDN routing efficiency
- Mobile reliability
Here’s the 2025 snapshot:
📊 HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3 (2025 Edition)
| Feature | HTTP/1.1 (1997) | HTTP/2 (2015) | HTTP/3 (2022+, QUIC) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transport | TCP | TCP | UDP (QUIC) |
| Multiplexing | No | Yes | Yes (independent streams) |
| HOL Blocking | Yes | Yes (TCP) | None |
| Header Compression | None | HPACK | QPACK |
| Connection Setup | 1–3 RTT | 1–3 RTT | 0–1 RTT |
| Mobile Performance | Poor | Decent | Best |
| Real Adoption (2025) | 15–20% | 60–65% | 25–30% and rising |
| Browser Support | 100% | ~98% | ~95–97% |
🦕 HTTP/1.1 – The Dinosaur That Refuses to Die
Why it still dominates:
- Corporate proxies downgrade connections
- Old load balancers downgrade traffic back to HTTP/1.1
- Cheap hosting providers
- Legacy browsers & IoT devices
- Internal APIs nobody migrated
Problems:
- No multiplexing
- HOL blocking
- Browser opens 6 parallel connections
- Massive header repetition
If you still rely on HTTP/1.1 in 2025, you are paying a latency tax every single day.
⚡ HTTP/2 – The Multiplexing Hero (With One Big Problem)
HTTP/2 solved a lot:
- Binary framing
- Multiplexing
- Header compression
- Single connection
But it still suffers from TCP Head-of-Line Blocking:
One lost packet → all streams wait.
On flaky networks (mobile, 3–5% packet loss), H2 often performs worse than people expect.
Still excellent for: CDNs, production APIs, stable networks.
HTTP/3 – QUIC Is the Real Upgrade
HTTP/3 ditches TCP entirely and uses QUIC over UDP.
Big wins:
- 0-RTT resume
- No HOL blocking
- Faster handshakes
- Better encryption (TLS 1.3 built-in)
- Superior mobile performance
- Stable under packet loss
This is the first protocol designed for modern, mobile, global internet traffic.
📈 Real 2025 Performance Results
| Scenario | HTTP/1.1 | HTTP/2 | HTTP/3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 small assets | 4–6s | ~1.2s | ~0.9s |
| 3% packet loss | Terrible | Bad | Good |
| Flaky mobile | Painful | Okay | Best |
| First load | Slow | Slow | Fastest |
| Repeat visits | ~Same | ~Same | Instant (0-RTT) |
The Problem Nobody Mentions
Even if your CDN + app support HTTP/3:
Many users still fall back to 1.1 or 2.0 due to network intermediaries.
Common blockers:
- Corporate firewalls
- Middleboxes that strip UDP
- Legacy devices
- Some enterprise proxies
- Outdated routers
- Misconfigured hosting
This is why simply enabling HTTP/3 is not enough – everything in the path must support it.
So What Should You Use in 2025?
HTTP/1.1 → Only for legacy systems
Or internal APIs that never changed.
HTTP/2 → Still excellent and widely reliable
Stable, cheap, widely supported.
HTTP/3 → Enable it everywhere you can
(Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai, Bunny — all support it now)
Quick Checklist to Move to HTTP/3 (2025)
CDN
- Cloudflare → Enable QUIC + HTTP/3
- CloudFront → Supported on new distributions
- Fastly/Akamai/Bunny → Native support
Self-Hosted
- Nginx 1.25+ QUIC
- Caddy 2.6+ (auto HTTP/3)
- Traefik v3
- LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed
Backend
- Node.js 21+ with QUIC
- Go, Rust, Java (Netty) → great QUIC libraries
- Python → aioquic or reverse proxy
Final Verdict (2025)
HTTP/1.1 → Legacy tech
HTTP/2 → Today’s safe default
HTTP/3 → Today’s performance baseline
HTTP/3 isn’t “future tech” anymore - it’s the baseline for fast global apps in 2025.
The question isn’t if you should upgrade…
It’s how much faster your users will be when you do.
Part of the “Networking for DevOps & SRE – 2025 Edition” series
Part 1 → HTTP/HTTPS/TCP/UDP Foundations
Part 3 → TLS 1.2 vs TLS 1.3 in Production: (drops Next Tuesday 7:30 PM IST)
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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Sreekanth Kuruba
Sreekanth Kuruba | Sciencx (2025-12-02T13:33:40+00:00) HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3 – Which One Are You Still Using in 2025?. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/12/02/http-1-1-vs-http-2-vs-http-3-which-one-are-you-still-using-in-2025/
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