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HTTP/2 support in Azure Front Door

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Currently, HTTP/2 support is active for all Azure Front Door configurations. No further action is required from customers.

HTTP/2 is a major revision to HTTP/1.1 that provides you with faster web performance by reducing response time. HTTP/2 maintains the familiar HTTP methods, status codes, and semantics of HTTP/1.1 to improve user experience. Although HTTP/2 is designed to work with HTTP and HTTPS, many client web browsers only support HTTP/2 over Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Note

HTTP/2 protocol support is available only for requests from clients to Front Door. The communication from Front Door to back ends in the back-end pool happens over HTTP/1.1.

HTTP/2 benefits

The benefits of HTTP/2 include:

  • Multiplexing and concurrency

    Using HTTP 1.1, making multiple resource requests requires multiple TCP connections, and each connection imposes its own performance cost. HTTP/2 allows multiple resources to be requested on a single TCP connection.

  • Header compression

    By compressing the HTTP headers for served resources, significantly less data is sent over the wire.

  • Stream dependencies

    Stream dependencies allow the client to indicate to the server which resources have priority.

HTTP/2 browser support

All of the major browsers have implemented HTTP/2 support in their current versions. Non-supported browsers automatically fall back to HTTP/1.1.

Browser Minimum Version
Microsoft Edge 12
Google Chrome 43
Mozilla Firefox 38
Opera 32
Safari 9

Next Steps

To learn more about HTTP/2, visit the following resources: