In the constant race to speed up the web, Google quietly rolled out a new transport protocol in 2012—QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections). Over the years, it has evolved from an experimental feature to a backbone technology used by services like Chrome, YouTube, and Google Search.
QUIC replaces the traditional TCP + TLS stack with a single protocol built directly on top of UDP. This shift gives QUIC a major performance edge.
Traditionally, when you load a website over HTTPS, your browser and the server have to go through: