One of the more interesting, perhaps noble, initiatives that Google has invested in within the last five years has been a focus on making the Web faster. Through tools, such as PageSpeed, Google has sought to push the Web as a whole to be faster, leaner, and more user-friendly.

No doubt this initiative is not entirely altruistic. Google has built their business on extensive web search and crawlers are always at the mercy of the speed of the pages they crawl. The faster the web pages, the faster and more comprehensive is the crawling; therefore, less time and less infrastructure resulting in less money required. The bottom line here is that a faster web benefits Google, as much as it does people creating and viewing web sites.

But this is mutually beneficial. If web sites are faster to comply with Google's preferences, everyone benefits with a faster Web.

This brings us to HTTP/2, a version of HTTP that replaces 1.1, introduced in 1999 and largely the defacto method for most of the Web. HTTP/2 also envelops and implements a lot of SPDY, a makeshift protocol that Google developed and supported through Chrome.

HTTP/2 and SPDY introduce a host of optimizations including header compression and non-blocking and multiplexed request handling.

If you're using version 1.6, net/http supports HTTP/2 out of the box. If you're using version 1.5 or earlier, you can use the experimental package.