About the Design of QUIC Firefox Transport Protocol

Abstract

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) Chrome is an experimental transport layer network protocol designed by Jim Roskind at Google, initially implemented in 2012 and announced publicly in 2013. One of the QUIC's goals is to improve performance of connection-oriented web applications that are currently using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). To do that, QUIC achieves a reduced latency and a better stream-multiplexing support to avoid network congestion. In 2015, Firefox Mozilla started to work on an equivalent QUIC transport protocol for their browser. This idea was motivated by the differences between Chrome and Firefox. Despite the fact that Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are both web browser engines, there are some significant differences between them, such as file hierarchy, open source policies (Firefox is completely, while Chrome is only partial), tabs design, continuous integration, and more. Likewise QUIC Chrome, QUIC Firefox is a new multiplexed and secure transport based on User Datagram Protocol (UDP), designed from the ground up and optimized for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol 2 (HTTP/2) semantics. While built with HTTP/2 as the primary application protocol, QUIC builds on decades of transport and security experience, and implements mechanisms that make it attractive as a modern general-purpose transport. In addition to describing the main design of QUIC Firefox, this paper will compare Firefox with QUIC Firefox. Our preliminary experimental results support that QUIC Firefox has a faster execution time, less latency time, and a better throughput time than the traditional Firefox.