Web Browser Parallel Downloads vs Pipelining

Question

I always knew web browsers could do parallel downloads. But then the other day I heard about pipelining. I thought pipelining was just another name for parallel downloads, but then found out even firefox has pipelining disabled by default. What is the difference between these things and how do work together?

Answer 1

As I under stand it, "parallel downloads" are requests going out on multiple sockets. They can be to totally unrelated servers but they don't have to be.

Pipelining is an HTTP/1.1 feature that lets you make multiple requests on the same socket before receiving a response. When connecting to the same server, this reduces the number of sockets, conserving resources.