Difference Between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 (With Table)

If you use the internet, you’ve probably come across the term HTTP or HTTPS. It is also the most often viewed letter, especially considering the billions of websites that are currently active. The HTTP or HyperText Transfer Protocol is the acronym. This serves as both the client-side and a server protocol, defining how messages are sent and structured over the internet.

HTTP 1.0 vs HTTP 1.1

The main difference between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 is that In To signify successful requests and to identify transmission problems, HTTP 1.0 Status codes were utilized. HTTP/1.1 supports chunk transfers, which enabled material to be streamed in chunks and extra headers to be delivered after the message body.

In 1996, HTTP/1.0 was formally introduced and acknowledged. Its popularity has skyrocketed since then. Only rudimentary authentication (challenge-response control) is provided by HTTPv1.0; a key problem with this technique is that usernames and passwords are not encrypted, leaving them susceptible to spying, and with no time constraints. There were only 16 status codes.

HTTP 1.1 also provides for persistent connections, which implies that many responses and requests can be sent over the same HTTP connection. The OPTIONS method is new in HTTP/1.1. This technique can easily be used by an HTTP client to discover the HTTP server’s capabilities. It’s primarily utilized in web applications for cross-origin resource sharing.

Comparison Table Between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1

Parameters of Comparison

HTTP 1.0

HTTP 1.1

Status Code

There are 16 status codes that may be defined; however, the error pop-ups are is not precise enough.

Error reporting is faster and more efficient with the ability to specify 24 status codes.

Authentication Mechanism

Because passwords and usernames and are also sent in clear text or base64 encoded, the basic authentication mechanism is insecure.

Because it utilizes digest authentication and NTLM authentication, it is relatively secure.

Caching

The If-Modified-Since header is used to assist caching.

Uses some extra headers like cache control.

Performance Optimization

Supports caching to serve more pages quicker.

Many optimizations are utilized as a workaround to the “six connections per host” requirement include spriting, concatenating, inlining, and domain sharding.

Key Features

There is only one request and answer for each TCP connection.

It enables connection reuse, which means that many requests and answers can be sent and received for each TCP connection.

What is HTTP 1.0?

Only rudimentary authentication (challenge-response control) is provided by HTTPv1.0; a key problem with this technique is that usernames and passwords are not encrypted, leaving them susceptible to spying, and there are no time constraints. any information obtained by spying can be used for a long time after it was obtained. The client should calculate a checksum of the password, username, one-time value including HTTP request type, and the requested URI for a valid response.

Because HTTP1.0 was meant to utilize a new connection of TCP for each request, each appeal had to pay for the expense of establishing a new connection of TCP. Because most Internet transactions are brief and seldom progress beyond the slow-start stage, they do not make optimal use of available bandwidth. Although some version1.0 implementations utilized a “keep-alive” header to demand that the link can be kept alive, this did not work well with in-between proxy.

The server must still provide replies in the same sequence as the matching request for a given connection. A client doesn’t have to wait for the response to its previous request before submitting another over the same connection (pipelining). It reduces network round-trip latency while also optimizing the TCP protocol’s capabilities.

What is HTTP 1.1?

By introducing permanent connections and pipelining, it solves this problem. HTTP/1.1 implies that a connection of TCP should be kept active unless explicitly requested to disconnect when using persistent connections. It permits the client to submit numerous appeals over the same connection without having to wait for each one to be answered, significantly increasing HTTP/1.1’s performance over HTTP/1.0.

Unfortunately, this optimization technique has an inherent bottleneck. Because several data packets just can’t pass each other on their way. there are times when a request at the front of the queue fails to get the resource it requires, causing all requests behind it to be blocked.

This is known as HOL head-of-line blocking, and it’s a major issue when it comes to improving HTTP/1.1 connection performance. Separate, parallel TCP connections may solve the problem, however, the number of concurrent TCP connections between a client and a server is limited, and each new connection consumes a lot of resources.

Flow control in HTTP/1.1 is based on TCP. When TCP is established, both the server and client use their system default settings to determine buffer sizes. If the receiver’s buffer is partially full, it will inform the sender of the receiver’s receive window, or the amount of free space in its buffer.

Main Differences Between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1

  1. HTTP1.0 is mostly utilized in the header, but HTTP1.1 is used to introduce a more sophisticated cache management approach.
  2. There is some bandwidth waste in HTTP1.0, but there is less bandwidth waste in HTTP 1.1.
  3. The Host header field is supported by HTTP1.1 request and response messages, although HTTP1.0 thinks that each server should bind a distinct IP address.
  4. In HTTP1.0, there is only one request and answer for each TCP connection, whereas HTTP 1.1 enables connection reuse.
  5. Spriting, concatenating, inlining, and domain sharding are some of the optimizations utilized in HTTP 1.1, whereas HTTP 1.0 supports caching to serve websites quicker.

Conclusion

Since its inception in 1989, the HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, has been the standard for data transfer on the Web. There have been just a few modifications to HTTP/1.1 since it was first released in 1997. However, in 2015, HTTP/2 was introduced,

it included many ways for reducing latency, since then, HTTP/1.1 has grown in popularity, with some rough estimates claiming that about a third of all websites on the internet now support it. Understanding the technological distinctions between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 can help web developers make educated and efficient judgments regarding emerging best practices in this shifting world.

References

  1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1243114/
  2. http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2125