3.9 What is HTTP/1.1? HTTP/1.1 is a new standard transmission protocol for the world wide web. The HTTP/1.1 standard allows the browser to negotiate "chunked" transfers, resume aborted downloads, and many other low-level but highly useful things. The major benefit of HTTP/1.1 is this: under a "normal" HTTP/1.0 transmission, your browser must open a new connection for every image, animation, or text document on a page. Each of these transfers has a normal "speed curve" -- they start out slow and get gradually faster the longer they last. On a page with many small pictures, this leads to long load times because each graphic is going through its own "speed curve". On an HTTP/1.1 server, a single transfer can contain many of the graphics, thus sharing the "speed curve", and allowing the page to load faster. HTTP/1.1 must be supported both at the browser level and the server level. Many sites are switching to HTTP/1.1 servers.