The HTTPS DNS journey

Here at Voxga, we’ve been following the development and implementation of this new DNS record type. The HTTPS record, it allows for more efficient Multi-CDN setups and for a thing we really like: HTTP/3 ON THE FIRST CONNECTION.

Yes, yes, you read that right. No more Alt-Svc. For all the HTTP/3 fanboys like us, this is really cool.

To test out the compatibility of HTTPS records, we set up a test page: https://httpstest.voxga.es/. This page will only load if your browser supports HTTPS records.

Based on our testing, both Safari and Firefox load the page correctly. However, we found an issue with Chromium-based browsers. These browsers currently do not seem to load websites that rely solely on HTTPS records without accompanying A/AAAA records. Yes… Yes… I know it is very sad, but we have to understand that RFC 9460 is quite recent, and it is not even a standard yet.

But the hope is not lost, we have submitted an issue report to the Chromium developers (which you can view here: https://issues.chromium.org/u/1/issues/388545139).

The Chromium team responded quite fast to our report, faster than we expected. They verified the issue and indicated that this is not an immediate priority, but that after their ongoing work to improve their DNS resolution logic, they will work on it.

We have decided to keep our test site active. So it can be used for testing support in the future.

What can you do now? Well, you can set up a hybrid approach with both A/AAAA and HTTPS records for now, it’s intended for backward compatibility and shouldn’t be necessary in the long run. So, soon(tm) we might have an internet where the websites don’t have A/AAAA records.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day :3