Microsoft has announced some upcoming changes to the way Edge handles both encrypted and unencrypted traffic. The changes will speed up connections and lead to lower network latency.
These changes will come to Edge through Windows Insider builds and will be added to the Edge core, the EdgeHTML engine, from version 14.14361 onwards.
The first of these new features will be support for TLS 1.3, the latest version of the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. TLS 1.3 was announced last January, and is expected to be released this summer.
TLS 1.3 is a simple upgrade to the web's most popular traffic encryption mechanism, and it seems Microsoft is rushing to adopt it.
Unfortunately, all TLS connections require three roundtrips between the client and server to establish secure connections. Two roundtrips are for establishing the TLS connection, and the last one is for the TCP connection. This is where TLS False Start and TCP Fast Open come in to help.
TLS False Start is an extension to the TLS protocol that allows connections to start sending encrypted data after the first TLS roundtrip between client and server. This reduces one of the two TLS roundtrips.
TCP Fast Open is an extension of the TCP protocol that uses an encrypted cookie stored on the client to authenticate subsequent connections to a server. This allows future TCP connections to reduce the number of TLS roundtrips required.
As we mentioned above, we will see the new features in Edge (Insiders will have it first) from build 14.352 onwards.
