Microsoft is adopting Google's QUIC technology for Windows HTTP/3 stack

In a blog post Microsoft has revealed that it is adopting Google’s QUIC transport layer network protocol for Windows.

QUIC reduces network connection latency dramatically and uses multiple multiplexed UDP connections to speed data transfer. It also deals better with network congestion.

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) was initially developed by Jim Roskind at Google and is in the process of becoming an IETF standard. Google and Cloudflare have nevertheless rolled out the technology already to their networks and clients, with Google Chrome already supporting it. Google says more than half of Chrome’s connection to their sites use QUIC. That amounts however to only 3-4% of internet traffic.

Microsoft is, however, rolling their own general-purpose QUIC library, MsQuic, which they have released on GitHub, which may increase adoption, and will soon ship Windows with MsQuic built into the kernel as part of the Windows HTTP/3 stack.

Microsoft is also dogfooding the technology internally as part of Microsoft 365, IIS, the .NET Core and SMB.

Microsoft notes:

“MsQuic brings performance and security improvements to many important networking scenarios. Our online services benefit the most from performance improvements like reduced tail latency and faster connection setup. Our connections will be able to seamlessly switch networks because they can survive IP address/port changes. This equates to better user experience on our edge devices.”

Microsoft says MsQuic is ready for prototyping and testing, and developers can check it out at GitHub here.

via The Register