Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Moving Towards a More Secure Web
Thursday, September 8, 2016
To help users browse the web safely, Chrome indicates connection security with an icon in the address bar. Historically, Chrome has not explicitly labelled HTTP connections as non-secure. Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure.
Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn’t reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or
modify
the site before it gets to you.
A substantial portion of web traffic has transitioned to HTTPS so far, and HTTPS usage is consistently increasing. We recently hit a milestone with more than half of Chrome desktop page loads now served over HTTPS. In addition, since the time we
released our HTTPS report
in February, 12 more of the top 100 websites have changed their serving default from HTTP to HTTPS.
Studies show that users
do not perceive
the lack of a “secure” icon as a warning, but also that users become blind to warnings that occur too frequently.
Our plan
to label HTTP sites more clearly and accurately as non-secure will take place in gradual steps, based on increasingly stringent criteria. Starting January 2017, Chrome 56 will label HTTP pages with password or credit card form fields as "not secure," given their particularly sensitive nature.
In following releases, we will continue to extend HTTP warnings, for example, by labelling HTTP pages as “not secure” in Incognito mode, where users may have higher expectations of privacy. Eventually, we plan to label all HTTP pages as non-secure, and change the HTTP security indicator to the red triangle that we use for broken HTTPS.
We will publish updates to this plan as we approach future releases, but don’t wait to get started moving to HTTPS. HTTPS is
easier and cheaper than ever before
, and enables both the
best
performance
the web offers and
powerful
new
features
that are too sensitive for HTTP. Check out our
set-up guides
to get started.
Posted by Emily Schechter, Chrome Security Team
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