HTTP/3 is faster with some work and help from Cloudflare

At the P99 2026 virtual conference, Elvis Chidera, a staff engineer at Germany-based global delivery service Delivery Hero, explained how the company moved most of its user base to HTTP/3, and consequently cut its apps’ total end-to-end response time of the home screen by 17 percent.  Chidera, who managed the project, explained that, as promised on the tin, HTTP/3 delivers the web faster than HTTP/2, though it has slow bits that need to be adjusted to work properly.  Uber eats Delivery Hero Delivery Hero is all but unknown in the US, which is dominated . But it is a company with global reach outside the US, with an estimated user base of 60 million across Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Uber is currently acquiring Delivery Hero for $14.8 billion, with plans to unite the company with Uber Eats. With this purchase, Uber would expand the number of markets where it offers both ride-hailing and delivery services, though not necessarily under the Uber Eats nameplate. Delivery Hero centrally manages separate apps for different regions, all of which it built or acquired. Asians can order poke bowls and sundries through Foodpanda. Turks can order kebabs through Yemeksepeti. Throughout Spain, Italy, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and much of Africa, the Glovo app is where to ring up the late-night deliveries. And in Latin America, users dial in to PedidosYa to get what they need from nearby farmacias, restaurantes, and mercados. All these regions have widely varying network connectivity, a problem Delivery Hero wanted to minimize.   Last mile networking was most often the bottleneck. Apps in Pakistan, for instance, could take nearly a second (at p90) to establish a secure handshake with a server. The engineering team looked at HTTP/3 as a way to lower, even eliminate, that latency.  A QUIC-er HTTP The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) formally introduced the third version of the internet’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol in 2022. HTTP is the application layer protocol that connects browsers and other resources connected to servers over the Internet.  The previous versions of HTTP were built on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which offered guaranteed delivery and flow control. In conjunction with the Internet Protocol (IP), TCP/IP built the modern internet.  HTTP/3 replaced TCP with Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC), developed by Google, to address some of TCP’s perceived sluggishness as a transfer protocol.  UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol and, unlike TCP, it does not guarantee packet delivery or flow control.