CloudFlare is introducing HTTP/2 support for all of its users, to be available on all SSL/TLS connections – while still supporting SPDY – so netizens can spend more time with their families instead of waiting for pages to load this Christmas.

Talking to The Register on Tuesday night, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince explained the company’s “multiple step rollout” of the future of the web.

“The first step really started when we turned on TLS. Thursday will be the second step, when we announce base protocol support for everyone,” Prince said, before admitting “for most customers we’ve actually quietly already turned it on.”

“The way we do rollouts is roll out to free customers in one particular data centre: free customers in Toronto in this instance. So as of last Wednesday, they went live, so that happened quietly, and over the holiday weekend in the US we’ve been expanding that to other data centres,” said Prince.

“So, by the end of Tuesday we’d be done with the push (so it’s in all facilities) and then Wednesday is just a day of buffer before the announcement on Thursday. The third step is what we’re doing in the New Year,” he added.

Dodging HTTP/2 scanners for “a massive spike” on Thursday, Prince stated that the rollout will be “a Christmas present to the internet”.

“This is the first time that the underlying protocol of the internet, HTTP, has been updated since 1998, so it’s a pretty big change on one level, but on another level it’s just based on a protocol developed by Google called SPDY,” said Prince.

While not initially developed to replace HTTP, the method in which it overrides connection management and data transfer formats has substantially informed the Internet Engineering Task Force’s HTTP/2.

CloudFlare has supported SPDY for just over three years, and Prince claimed that “75 per cent of the top Alexa websites support SPDY because of CloudFlare”.

“When HTTP/2, which was really an outgrowth of SPDY, came out, we committed to making sure this was available to all of our users, including those using our service for free. We don’t believe you should pay a tax to be a part of the modern internet,” said Prince.