I'm reading Kurose's "Computer networking - A top-down approach", and came to the part where they explain the differences between HTTP with Non-persistent connections vs. with persistent connections.
Before diving into details, they say that
Although HTTP uses persistent connections in its default mode, HTTP clients and servers can be configured to use non-persistent connections instead.
from what I understand that Persistent connections are used. But then, in the Non-persistent part, they say that
In their default modes, most browsers open 5 to 10 parallel TCP connections, and each of these connections handles one request- response transaction.
On the other hand, in the persistent part they say:
Typically, the HTTP server closes a connection when it isn’t used for a certain time (a configurable timeout interval). When the server receives the back-to-back requests, it sends the objects back-to-back. The default mode of HTTP uses persistent connections with pipelining. Most recently, HTTP/2 [RFC 7540] builds on HTTP 1.1 by allowing multiple requests and replies to be interleaved in the same connection, and a mechanism for prioritizing HTTP message requests and replies within this connection.
I am confused. The only way I can see this working is: Although browsers may open several connections and thus receive data in parallel, each of those connections is persistent. Does this make any sense? Or am I missing/misunderstanding something?
Thanks in advance!