{
  "id": 17310142,
  "title": "HTTP/3 is faster with some work and help from Cloudflare",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/30/http-3-is-faster-with-some-work-and-help-from-cloudflare-17310142",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-30T20:00:29.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register",
    "slug": "the-register",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/10/30/http/3-is-faster-with-some-work-and-help-from-cloudflare/5306767"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "When ordering food from a mobile device, even the time spent navigating the app is considered wasted time. At the P99 2026 virtual conference, Elvis Chidera, a staff engineer at Delivery Hero, shared how the company transitioned most of its user base to HTTP/3, resulting in a 17% reduction in the app's total end-to-end response time on the home screen. Chidera, who led the project, mentioned that HTTP/3 offers faster web performance than HTTP/2, although it has some limitations that need to be addressed. Delivery Hero, primarily known for its Uber Eats service in the US, operates globally with an estimated 60 million users across Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The company manages separate apps for different regions, each tailored to specific network connectivity challenges. In regions with varying network conditions, the last mile networking often becomes a bottleneck. Delivery Hero aimed to minimize these issues by moving its apps to HTTP/3. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) officially introduced HTTP/3 in 2022, replacing the previous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC), developed by Google. UDP, unlike TCP, doesn't guarantee packet delivery or flow control, making HTTP/3 faster by reducing round trips for secure connections. By caching session tickets, HTTP/3 allows apps to start sending eligible data while the handshake is still in progress, eliminating the need for two round trips to exchange data. Chidera explained that HTTP/3 eliminates head-of-line blocking, as packets are sent in multiple streams rather than a single string, similar to HTTP/2. Transitioning to HTTP/3 proved relatively simple for Delivery Hero, as they utilized Cloudflare's content delivery network. Adding HTTP/3 support to clients, mostly mobile devices, was also relatively straightforward, as Apple supported HTTP/3 since iOS 15 and most native browsers already offered native HTTP/3 support. However, Android posed a challenge, as the engineers had to incorporate Google's Cronet library for network support. While Cronet initially introduced a significant delay of approximately 800 milliseconds at P90, the team addressed this issue by forking the code into a custom bridge using the OKCronet library and optimizing the initialization process. As a result, they achieved a 10x improvement in read latency, reducing the P95 latency time from 1.2 seconds to just 120 milliseconds.",
  "summary": "How the Uber-bound delivery giant tuned its mobile networking stack to cut latency",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}