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0 pointsacdha10y ago0 comments

Others have pointed out why HTTP/2 is still better but if you're curious about HTTP pipelining here are the reasons why Firefox and Chrome disabled it after years of testing:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354 https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/network...

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bsdetector10y ago· 2 in thread

Does nobody find it strange that neither Google nor Mozilla were able to determine what proxies and software broke with pipelining? In their controlled experiments pipelining worked fine. Pipelining worked fine in Opera, and in Mobile Safari, and Android Browser, and pretty much universally in Firefox as reported by users that enabled it.

It's a fair bet that the reason these companies didn't find out what was causing the very few failures was because it was due to SuperFish or other illicit software. Some people's computers having malware isn't a good reason disable pipelining.

acdhaOP10y ago

Your theory that it was just malware is easily disproven by reading the bug reports and blog posts from the years people spent trying to make this work.

Firefox found far from universal success even after years of testing and blacklisting known-noncompliant servers:

http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-brief-note-on-pipelines...

(the actual blacklist at the time http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/1d122eaa9070/netw...)

Opera's implementation apparently relied on some non-trivial heuristics but they apparently weren't well documented and were discontinued with the transition to Blink.

Similarly, it's easy to find cases where people discovered real problems in the wild with the iOS implementation:

http://tech.vg.no/2011/12/14/safari-on-ios-5-randomly-switch...

(This also affected Mozilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=716840)

https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/issues/528

It's easy to understand why people decided that it wasn't worth investing so much time in this when HTTP/2 would deliver significant additional benefits and by using TLS as a starting point could provably avoid the worst tampering proxies entirely.

bsdetector10y ago

Yes, there was one report of one problem with iOS pipelining, and circa-2000 IIS had problems. But these aren't what caused them to disable pipelining, allegedly it was the unknown software causing problems. For instance Google reported that some small percent of requests failed, but they never determined the cause for it. We know that SuperFish and other malware was out there intercepting HTTP, and unknown software was causing pipelining problems, and malware isn't known for its attention to detail.

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