Google has support for the QUIC protocol in the Chrome browser. When this post was written, it was only enabled for their own websites by default, and you could enable it for use on other domains too – assuming the webserver supports it. That’s no longer the case: since around Chrome 87/93 (2020-2021), QUIC – now standardised as HTTP/3 – is enabled by default, so the steps below are mostly of historical interest.
At the time, the way to turn it on was to open a new tab, go to chrome://flags/, find the Experimental QUIC protocol and change the setting to Enabled, then restart Chrome. That flag has since been removed; in modern Chrome there’s nothing to toggle.
To find out whether QUIC is being used by your Chrome, you used to open chrome://net-internals/#quic. That QUIC tab has since been removed from net-internals; today you capture a network log with chrome://net-export/ instead (or just add the Protocol column in DevTools’ Network tab, where QUIC connections show up as h3).
When this post was written, QUIC was disabled by default.
After changing the setting to enable QUIC support and restarting Chrome, the results were much better.
On the same page, you can also get a live list of which sessions are using the QUIC protocol. If it’s enabled, it’ll probably only be Google services for now.
If you want to understand what QUIC actually is and how it compares to HTTP/2, I wrote a follow-up: Google’s QUIC protocol: moving the web from TCP to UDP .