One year from now, with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, we will change the default settings of Chrome to enable “Always Use Secu...
One year from now, with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, we will change the default settings of Chrome to enable “Always Use Secure Connections”. This means Chrome will ask for the user's permission before the first access to any public site without HTTPS.
The “Always Use Secure Connections” setting warns users before accessing a site without HTTPS
Chrome Security's mission is to make it safe to click on links. Part of being safe means ensuring that when a user types a URL or clicks on a link, the browser ends up where the user intended. When links don't use HTTPS, an attacker can hijack the navigation and force Chrome users to load arbitrary, attacker-controlled resources, and expose the user to malware, targeted exploitation, or social engineering attacks. Attacks like this are not hypothetical—software to hijack navigations is readily available and attackers have previously used insecure HTTP to compromise user devices in a targeted attack.
Since attackers only need a single insecure navigation, they don't need to worry that many sites have adopted HTTPS—any single HTTP navigation may offer a foothold. What's worse, many plaintext HTTP connections today are entirely invisible to users, as HTTP sites may immediately redirect to HTTPS sites. That gives users no opportunity to see Chrome's "Not Secure" URL bar warnings after the risk has occurred, and no opportunity to keep themselves safe in the first place.
To address this risk, we launched the “Always Use Secure Connections” setting in 2022 as an opt-in option. In this mode, Chrome attempts every connection over HTTPS, and shows a bypassable warning to the user if HTTPS is unavailable. We also previously discussed our intent to move towards HTTPS by default. We now think the time has come to enable “Always Use Secure Connections” for all users by default.
Now is the time.
For more than a decade, Google has published the HTTPS transparency report, which tracks the percentage of navigations in Chrome that use HTTPS. For the first several years of the report, numbers saw an impressive climb, starting at around 30-45% in 2015, and ending up around the 95-99% range around 2020. Since then, progress has largely plateaued.
HTTPS adoption expressed as a percentage of main frame page loads
This rise represents a tremendous improvement to the security of the web, and demonstrates that HTTPS is now mature and widespread. This level of adoption is what makes it possible to consider stronger mitigations against the remaining insecure HTTP.
Balancing user safety with friction
While it may at first seem that 95% HTTPS means that the problem is mostly solved, the truth is that a few percentage points of HTTP navigations is still a lot of navigations. Since HTTP navigations remain a regular occurrence for most Chrome users, a naive approach to warning on all HTTP navigations would be quite disruptive. At the same time, as the plateau demonstrates, doing nothing would allow this risk to persist indefinitely. To balance these risks, we have taken steps to ensure that we can help the web move towards safer defaults, while limiting the potential annoyance warnings will cause to users.
One way we're balancing risks to users is by making sure Chrome does not warn about the same sites excessively. In all variants of the "Always Use Secure Connections" settings, so long as the user regularly visits an insecure site, Chrome will not warn the user about that site repeatedly. This means that rather than warn users about 1 out of 50 navigations, Chrome will only warn users when they visit a new (or not recently visited) site without using HTTPS.
To further address the issue, it's important to understand what sort of traffic is still using HTTP. The largest contributor to insecure HTTP by far, and the largest contributor to variation across platforms, is insecure navigations to private sites. The graph above includes both those to public sites, such as example.com, and navigations to private sites, such as local IP addresses like 192.168.0.1, single-label hostnames, and shortlinks like intranet/. While it is free and easy to get an HTTPS certificate that is trusted by Chrome for a public site, acquiring an HTTPS certificate for a private site unfortunately remains complicated. This is because private names are "non-unique"—private names can refer to different hosts on different networks. There is no single owner of 192.168.0.1 for a certification authority to validate and issue a certificate to.
HTTP navigations to private sites can still be risky, but are typically less dangerous than their public site counterparts because there are fewer ways for an attacker to take advantage of these HTTP navigations. HTTP on private sites can only be abused by an attacker also on your local network, like on your home wifi or in a corporate network.
If you exclude navigations to private sites, then the distribution becomes much tighter across platforms. In particular, Linux jumps from 84% HTTPS to nearly 97% HTTPS when limiting the analysis to public sites only. Windows increases from 95% to 98% HTTPS, and both Android and Mac increase to over 99% HTTPS.
In recognition of the reduced risk HTTP to private sites represents, last year we introduced a variant of “Always Use Secure Connections” for public sites only. For users who frequently access private sites (such as those in enterprise settings, or web developers), excluding warnings on private sites significantly reduces the volume of warnings those users will see. Simultaneously, for users who do not access private sites frequently, this mode introduces only a small reduction in protection. This is the variant we intend to enable for all users next year.
“Always Use Secure Connections,” available at chrome://settings/security
In Chrome 141, we experimented with enabling “Always Use Secure Connections” for public sites by default for a small percentage of users. We wanted to validate our expectations that this setting keeps users safer without burdening them with excessive warnings.
Analyzing the data from the experiment, we confirmed that the number of warnings seen by any users is considerably lower than 3% of navigations—in fact, the median user sees fewer than one warning per week, and the ninety-fifth percentile user sees fewer than three warnings per week..
Understanding HTTP usage
Once “Always Use Secure Connections” is the default and additional sites migrate away from HTTP, we expect the actual warning volume to be even lower than it is now. In parallel to our experiments, we have reached out to a number of companies responsible for the most HTTP navigations, and expect that they will be able to migrate away from HTTP before the change in Chrome 154. For many of these organizations, transitioning to HTTPS isn't disproportionately hard, but simply has not received attention. For example, many of these sites use HTTP only for navigations that immediately redirect to HTTPS sites—an insecure interaction which was previously completely invisible to users.
Another current use case for HTTP is to avoid mixed content blocking when accessing devices on the local network. Private addresses, as discussed above, often do not have trusted HTTPS certificates, due to the difficulties of validating ownership of a non-unique name. This means most local network traffic is over HTTP, and cannot be initiated from an HTTPS page—the HTTP traffic counts as insecure mixed content, and is blocked. One common use case for needing to access the local network is to configure a local network device, e.g. the manufacturer might host a configuration portal at config.example.com, which then sends requests to a local device to configure it.
Previously, these types of pages needed to be hosted without HTTPS to avoid mixed content blocking. However, we recently introduced a local network access permission, which both prevents sites from accessing the user’s local network without consent, but also allows an HTTPS site to bypass mixed content checks for the local network once the permission has been granted. This can unblock migrating these domains to HTTPS.
Changes in Chrome
We will enable the "Always Use Secure Connections" setting in its public-sites variant by default in October 2026, with the release of Chrome 154. Prior to enabling it by default for all users, in Chrome 147, releasing in April 2026, we will enable Always Use Secure Connections in its public-sites variant for the over 1 billion users who have opted-in to Enhanced Safe Browsing protections in Chrome.
While it is our hope and expectation that this transition will be relatively painless for most users, users will still be able to disable the warnings by disabling the "Always Use Secure Connections" setting.
If you are a website developer or IT professional, and you have users who may be impacted by this feature, we very strongly recommend enabling the "Always Use Secure Connections" setting today to help identify sites that you may need to work to migrate. IT professionals may find it useful to read our additional resources to better understand the circumstances where warnings will be shown, how to mitigate them, and how organizations that manage Chrome clients (like enterprises or educational institutions) can ensure that Chrome shows the right warnings to meet those organizations' needs.
Looking Forward
While we believe that warning on insecure public sites represents a significant step forward for the security of the web, there is still more work to be done. In the future, we hope to work to further reduce barriers to adoption of HTTPS, especially for local network sites. This work will hopefully enable even more robust HTTP protections down the road.
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Comments
By tialaramex 2025-10-2818:574 reply I have had HTTPS-by-default for years and I can say that we're past the point where there's noticeable year-to-year change for which sites aren't HTTPS. It's almost always old stuff that pre-dates Let's Encrypt (and presumably just nobody ever added HTTPS). The news site which stopped updating in 2007, the blog somebody last posted to in 2011, that sort of thing.
I think it's important to emphasise that although Tim's toy hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") didn't come with baked in security, ordinary users have never really understood that. It seems to them as though http://foo.example/ must be guaranteed to be foo.example, just making that true by upgrading to HTTPS is way easier than somehow teaching billions of people that it wasn't true and then what they ought to do about that.
I am reminded of the UK's APP scams. "Authorized Push Payment" was a situation where ordinary people think they're paying say, "Big Law Firm" but actually a scammer persuaded them to give money to an account they control because historically the UK's payment systems didn't care about names, so to it a payment to "Big Law Firm" acct #123456789 is the same as a payment to "Jane Smith" acct #123456789 even though you'd never get a bank to open you an account in the name of "Big Law Firm" without documents the scammer doesn't have. To fix this, today's UK payment systems treat the name as a required match not merely for your records, so when you say "Big Law Firm" and try to pay Jane's account because you've been scammed, the software says "Wrong, are you being defrauded?" and so you're safe 'cos you have no reason to fill out "Jane Smith" as that's not who you're intending to give money to.
We could have tried to teach all the tens of millions of UK residents that the name was ignored and so they need other safeguards, but that's not practical. Upgrading payment systems to check the name was difficult but possible.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2819:0213 reply I run my blog in unencrypted HTTP/1.1 just to make a point that we do not have to depend on third parties to publish content online.
And I noticed that Whatsapp is even worse than Chrome, it opens HTTPS even if I share HTTP links.
By bruce511 2025-10-295:50 I applaud you for your principled stance. And of course this change in Chrome changes nothing wrt your ability to continue doing this.
Equally your preference for HTTP should not stand in the way of a more secure default for the average person.
Honestly I'd prefer that my mom didn't browse any http sites, it's just safer that way. But that doesn't detract from your ability to serve unencrypted pages which can easily be intercepted or modified by an ISP (or worse.)
Depend on one less third party, you still depend on the DNS Root servers, your ISP / hosting, domain registry, etc.
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-10-295:185 reply Third party root servers are generally used for looking up TLD nameservers, not for looking up domainnames registered to individuals publishing personal blogs^1
Fortunately, one can publish on the www without using ICANN DNS
For example http://199.233.217.201 or https://199.233.217.201
1. I have run own root server for over 15 years
An individual cannot even mention choosing to publish a personal blog over HTTP without being subjected to a kneejerk barrage of inane blather. This is truly a sad state of affairs
I'm experimenting with non-TLS, per packet encryption with a mechanism for built-in virtual hosting (no SNI) and collision-proof "domainnames" on the home network as a reminder that TLS is not the only way to do HTTPS
It's true we depend on ISPs for internet service but that's not a reason to let an unlimited number of _additional_ third parties intermediate and surveil everything we do over the internet
By JoshTriplett 2025-10-297:48 > inane blather
And this is why it's a good thing that every major browser will make it more and more painful, precisely so that instead of arguments about it, we'll just have people deciding whether they want their sites accessible by others or not.
Unencrypted protocols are being successfully deprecated.
By JakaJancar 2025-10-296:162 reply You have some weird definition of "root".
By aragilar 2025-10-299:46 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root, so you could (and people have/are) run your own root server.
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-10-2911:411 reply Definition of "root server"
Authoritative DNS nameserver that serves root.zone, e.g., the one provided by ICANN, or maybe a customised one
In own case it is served only to me on local network
Many years ago, one of the former ICANN board members mentioned on his personal blog running his own root
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-10-2911:57 People using the web can choose what software to use. This includes both client software and server software. Arguably the later ultimately determines whether HTTP is still available on the internet, regardless of whether it is used by any particular client software, e.g., a popular browser
One advertising company through its popular "free browser", a Trojan Horse to collect data for its own purposes, may attempt to "deprecate" an internet protocol by using its influence
But at least in theory such advertising companies are not in charge of such protocols, and whether the public, including people who write server software or client software, can use them or not
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2819:244 reply Let's Encrypt pushes me to run its self-updating certbot on my personal server, which is a big no-go.
I know about acme.sh, but still...
By tialaramex 2025-10-2819:462 reply They're focused on the thing that'll get the most people up and running for the least extra work from them. When you say "push" do you just mean that's the default or are they trying to get you to not use another ACME client like acme.sh or one built in to servers you run anyway or indeed rolling your own?
Like, the default for cars almost everywhere is you buy one made by some car manufacturer like Ford or Toyota or somebody, but usually making your own car is legal, it's just annoyingly difficult and so you don't do that.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2819:54 As a car mechanic, you could at least tune... until these days when tou can realistically tune only 10..15 years old models, because newer ones are just locked down computers on wheels.
>usually making your own car is legal
It may be legal but good luck ever getting registration for it.
It's actually not that bad in most states, some even have exceptions to emissions requirements for certain classes of self-built cars.
Now, getting required insurance coverage, that can be a different story. Btu even there, many states allow you to post a bond in lieu of an insurance policy meeting state minimums.
Usually making one car, or millions of cars, is doable.
It’s trying to make and sell three or four that is nearly impossible.
By tracker1 2025-10-2915:26 Related: Local Motors
I counted by hand, so it might be wrong, but they appear to list and link to 86 different ACME client implementations across more than a dozen languages: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/
I've used their stuff since it came out and never used certbot, FWIW. If I were to set something up today, I'd probably use https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated.
By bruce511 2025-10-295:43 Plus, it's one of the easier protocols to implement. I implemented it myself, and it didn't take long.
So you're absolutely not dependent on the client software, or indeed anyone else's client software.
By rascul 2025-10-292:21 There is a plethora of other clients besides certbot or acme.sh.
By tialaramex 2025-10-2820:351 reply ISRG (Let's Encrypt's parent entity) wrote Certbot, initially under the name "letsencrypt" but it was quickly renamed to be less confusing, and re-homed to the EFF rather than ISRG itself.
So, what you've said is true today, but historically Certbot's origin is tied to Let's Encrypt, which makes sense because initially ACME isn't a standard protocol, it's designed to become a standard protocol but it is still under development and the only practical server implementations are both developed by ISRG / Let's Encrypt. RFC 8555 took years.
Yes, it started that way, but complaining about the current auto-update behavior of the software (not the ACME protocol), is completely unrelated to Let's Encrypt and is instead an arbitrary design decision by someone at EFF.
As far as I remember, since the beginning certbot/let's encrypt client was a piece of crap especially regarding the autodownload and autoupdate (alias autobreak) behavior.
And I couldn't praise enough acme.sh at the opposite that is simple, dependency less and reliable!
By Macha 2025-10-2915:25 Honestly I abandoned acme.sh as it was largely not simple (it’s a giant ball of shell) and that has led to it not being reliable (e.g. silently changing the way you configure acme dns instance URLs, the vendor building their compatibility around an RCE, etc)
Host an onion website at home using solar energy, and the only third party your website will depend on is your internet provider :)
Onion websites also don't need TLS (they have their own built-in encryption) so that solves the previous commenter's complaint too. Add in decentralized mesh networking and it might actually be possible to eliminate the dependency on an ISP too.
By philipallstar 2025-10-299:391 reply > they have their own built-in encryption
What does this mean? Is that encryption not reliant on any third parties, or is it just relying on different third parties?
The onion URL is itself a public key - https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7... for example.
Proton Mail burned CPU time until they found a public key that started the way they wanted it to.
So that is the public key for an HTTPS equivalent as part of the tor protocol.
You can ALSO get an HTTPS certificate for an onion URL; a few providers offer it. But it’s not necessary for security - it does provide some additional verification (perhaps).
By zoeysmithe 2025-10-2913:521 reply If everyone who wants a human readable domain did this, it would environmentally irresponsible. Then 'typo' domains would be trivial. protonmailrmez31otcciphtkl or protonmailrmez3lotcciphtkl.
Its a shame these did put in a better built-in human readable url system. Maybe a free form text field 15-20 characters long appended to the public key and somehow be made part of that key. Maybe the key contains a checksum of those letters to verify the text field. So something like protonmail.rmez3lotcciphtkl+checksum.
But this being said, I think being a sort of independent 'not needing of third parties' ethic just isnt realistic. Its the libertarian housecat meme writ large. Once you're communicating with others and being part of a shared communal system, you lose that independence. Keeping a personal diary is independent. Anything past that is naturally communal and would involve some level of sharing, cooperation, and dependency on others.
I think this sort of anti-communal attitude is rooted in a lot of regressive stuff and myths of the 'man is an island' and 'great man' nonsense. Then leads to weird stuff like bizarre domain names and services no one likes to use. Outside of very limited use cases, tor just can't compete.
By akimbostrawman 2025-10-3012:44 >If everyone who wants a human readable domain did this, it would environmentally irresponsible
Could we finally stop acting like we know how other people's energy is being produced?
By 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2025-10-292:35 And an army of volunteers and feds to run relays
By bawolff 2025-10-297:18 What about the Tor directory authorities?
There is no magic do it all yourself. Communicating with people implies dependence.
By wongogue 2025-10-295:11 I gave up trying to build a solar panel.
By kelnos 2025-10-294:01 What about all the third parties running relays and exit nodes?
By treve 2025-10-293:41 If you think about it the spirit of the internet is based on collaboration with other parties. If you want no third parties, there's always file: and localhost.
CAs are uniquely assertive about their right to cut off your access.
My hosting provider may accidentally fuck up, but they'll apologise and fix it.
My CA fucks up, they e-mail me at 7pm telling me I've got to fix their fuck-up for them by jumping through a bunch of hoops they have erected, and they'll only give me 16 hours to do it.
Of course, you might argue my hosting provider has a much higher chance of fucking up....
By Dylan16807 2025-10-293:521 reply So what does "CA fixes the problem" look like in your head? Because they'll give you a new certificate right away. You have to install it, but you can automate that, and it's hard to imagine any way they could help that would be better than automation. What else do you want them to do? Asking them to not revoke incorrect or compromised certificates isn't good for maintaining security.
Imagine if, hypothetically speaking, the CA had given you a certificate based on a DNS-01 challenge, but when generating and validating the challenge record they'd forgotten to prefix it with an underscore. Which could have lead to a a certificate being issued to the wrong person if your website was a service like dyndns that lets users create custom subdomains.
Except (a) your website doesn't let users create custom subdomains; (b) as the certificate is now in use, you the certificate holder have demonstrated control over the web server as surely as a HTTP-01 challenge would; (c) you have accounts and contracts and payment information all confirming you are who you say you are; and (d) there is no suggestion whatsoever that the certificate was issued to the wrong person.
And you could have gotten a certificate for free from Lets Encrypt, if you had automatic certificate rotation in place - you paid $500 for a 12-month certificate because you don't.
An organisation with common sense policies might not need to revoke such a certificate at all, let alone revoke it with only hours of notice.
By Dylan16807 2025-10-298:13 You didn't answer my question. What would the CA fixing it look like? Your hosting example had the company fix problems, not ignore them.
And have you seen how many actual security problems CAs have refused to revoke in the last few years? Holding them to their agreements is important, even if a specific mistake isn't a security problem [for specific clients]. Letting them haggle over the security impact of every mistake is much more hassle than it's worth.
> if you had automatic certificate rotation in place - you paid $500 for a 12-month certificate because you don't
Then in this hypothetical I made a mistake and I should fix it for next time.
And I should be pretty mad at my CA for giving me an invalid certificate. Was there an SLA?
CAs have to follow the baseline rules set by Google and Mozilla regarding incident response timelines. If they gave you more time, the browsers would drop them as a supported CA.
The CAs have to follow the baseline rules set by the CA/Browser Forum which CAs are voting members of.
Mark my words, some day soon an enterprising politician will notice the CA system can be drawn into trade sanctions against the enemy of the day....
By tialaramex 2025-10-299:04 The BRs already have a deliberate carve out where a CA can notify that their government requires them to break the rules and how they'll do that, and then the browsers, on behalf of relying parties can take whatever action they deem appropriate.
If you're required to (or choose to) not tell us about it, because of active monitoring when we notice it's likely your CA will be distrusted for not telling us, this is easier because there's a mechanism to tell us about it - same way that there's a way to officially notify the US that you're a spy, so, when you don't (because duh you're a spy) you're screwed 'cos you didn't follow the rules.
The tech centralization under the US government does mean there's a vulnerability on the browser side, but I wouldn't speculate about how long that would last if there's a big problem.
By shadowgovt 2025-10-2819:053 reply Doesn't that mean that technically, any node in the network between you and your reader can mutate the contents of the blog in-transit without anyone being the wiser (up to and including arbitrary JavaScript inline injection)?
Probably a low-threat security risk for a blog.
By bsilvereagle 2025-10-2819:161 reply Yes, hotels were injecting ads on their free WiFi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804608
By Ferret7446 2025-10-2820:271 reply Devil's advocate, but maybe ISPs should all inject ads to make a point. They make money, and anyone using HTTP gets taught a free lesson on what MITM means
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2820:382 reply Before turning on the dude who thrives to keep the internet free, fix your corporate laptop that does MITM even for HTTPS connections.
By DaSHacka 2025-10-2912:02 "Free" for fraudsters to get their pickings, maybe.
By 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2025-10-292:40 I own a personal laptop?
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2819:181 reply I'd be happy if EU outlawed this instead of outlawing encryption.
But indeed, the ability to publish on my own outweights the risk of someone modding my content.
Most of us here read their news from work laptops, where the employer and their MiTM supplier are a much bigger threat even for HTTPS websites.
By shadowgovt 2025-10-2819:291 reply This puts the question into my brain, which I have never thought to pursue, of whether you could offer a self-signed cert that the user has to install for HTTPS.
Their client will complain loudly until and unless they install it, but then for those who care you could offer the best of both worlds.
Almost certainly more trouble than it's worth. G'ah, and me without any free time to pursue a weekend hobby project!
> for those who care you could offer the best of both worlds.
You're not really offering that because the first connection could've be intercepted.
By shadowgovt 2025-10-2913:59 Too true. The old model is that you have to sneaker-net that first step. To get someone's public key, you'd literally meet them in person and they'd hand you a copy. We don't do that anymore.
I can imagine alternate approaches (service that stores personal keys on an HTTPS server signed via a public cert, keys in peer-to-peer filesharing with the checksum provided side-channel), but that gets increasingly more elaborate for diminishing return.
By bawolff 2025-10-297:21 For a blog, i think the bigger risk is pervasive surveilence - gov reads all the connections and puts you on a list if the thing you are reading has the wrong keyword in it.
Do you depend on a DNS root server to map your website name to your IP address? That's a third party.
There are ways to remove that dependency, but it's going to involve a decentralized DNS replacement like Namecoin or Handshake, many of which include their own built-in alternatives to the CA system too so if "no third parties" is something you truly care about you can probably kill two birds with one stone here.
Registrar is the big one, if yours decides to do a Google and randomly ban you and automatically decline your appeal with AI, you're stuffed.
By tracker1 2025-10-2821:24 This is generally my biggest concern. Not that I'm doing anything shady, I've wanted to setup a potentially politically charged site in the past.
By throawayonthe 2025-10-297:351 reply why not make the point with at least a self signed cert?
99% of visitors wouldn't get the intended point - they'd think he's pro-cert, but forgot to renew it or something.
Honestly I don't even think technical users would get the 'point' most of the time.
Whenever I visit a HTTP-only site, I assume the administrator is either old and does not understand how to set up SSL, or it's an unmaintained/forgotten web server that hasn't been touched in about a decade.
> When ... I assume the ...
If it's (1) obviously recent content*, and (2) something that needs little security - a city council member's blog, or recipes - then how much do you care that it's HTTP-only?
*Or just date-insensitive
That's precisely the point of HTTPS, your harmless recipe site can start spreading malware without your knowledge if you make it HTTP, as the content can be changed by anyone it passes through.
> your harmless recipe site can ...
As can every recipe site with httpS - but a vulnerable WordPress plugin, or too-easy admin password, or malvertising, or a zillion other things.
But conveniently, "all sites gotta be httpS" puts the biggest part of the blame/load on the littlest little guys - who want to make and post good, unmonetized content. But don't have an IT skill set, nor want to deal with yet more admin overhead & costs.
By mpeg 2025-10-2915:23 It really doesn't matter if a personal blog decides to serve only http as a niche protest. But you really don't want to go back to the times when most sites were http; we had:
- Massive government spying programs, people forget that Chat Control used to be the standard, everything you ever browsed, posted or said online could be monitored
- Tracking that you could not disable, where your ISP would work with publishers appending http headers to every request that uniquely identified you.
- Not only little guys, as you say, were using http, it was government sites, news sites, a huge part of the internet was unencrypted and vulnerable to mitm. As you say, yes, it's not the only attack vector but it was one of the easiest to exploit, where any random wifi access point you're connected to could steal your credentials.
By ac29 2025-10-2919:26 > But conveniently, "all sites gotta be httpS" puts the biggest part of the blame/load on the littlest little guys - who want to make and post good, unmonetized content. But don't have an IT skill set, nor want to deal with yet more admin overhead & costs.
Sure, but if you dont have the skills to self host you are using an online service and ~100% of them will do HTTPS for you.
If you are self hosting, HTTPS can take as little as zero configuration - I use Caddy and it does it for me.
By deepsun 2025-10-300:27 Yea, but then every time I open your blog, all the middle-men receive some metadata about my device/browser/language etc, that helps to fingerprint my activity online.
There are dozens of us I guess that care about this kind of thing. I have never really understood the obsession with https for static content that I don't care if anyone can see I am reading like a blog post. HTTPS should be for things that matter, everything else can, and think should use HTTP when it is not necessary.
Depending on yet another third party to provide what is IMHO a luxury should not be required, and I have been continually confused as to why it is being forced down everyone's throat.
By IgorPartola 2025-10-2819:201 reply It’s static while you control it. Soon as I MIIT your content it will look to your users like you updated your site with a crypto miner and a credit card form. You can publish your site with a self-signed key if you’d like and only depend on your ISP/web host provider, DNS provider, domain registrar, and the makers of your host OS and web server and a few dozen other things.
By afavour 2025-10-294:59 Man In Icy Tundra
By IgorPartola 2025-10-293:32 Typos happen :)
> HTTPS should be for things that matter
If that were the universal state, then it would be easy to tell when someone was visiting a site that mattered, and you could probably infer a lot about it by looking at the cleartext of the non-HTTPS side they were viewing right before they went to it.
You can already see what site someone visits with HTTPS. It's in the Client Hello, and is important for things like L4 load balancing (e.g. HAProxy can look at the host to choose what backend to forward the TCP packets for that connection to without terminating TLS). It's also important for network operators (e.g. you at home) to be able to filter unwanted traffic (e.g. Google's).
I don't think seeing the site is too important, although there are TLS extensions to encrypt that, too[0]. In practice, a huge chunk of sites still have unique IPs, so seeing that someone is connecting to 1.2.3.4 gives you a pretty good idea of what site they're visiting. That's even easier if they're using plaintext DNS (i.e. instead of DoH) so that you can correlate "dig -t a example.com => 1.2.3.4" followed immediately by a TCP connection to 1.2.3.4. CDNs like Cloudflare can mitigate that for a lot of sites, but not millions of others.
However, the page you're fetching from that domain is encrypted, and that's vastly more sensitive. It's no big deal to visit somemedicinewebsite.com in a theocratic region like Iran or Texas. It may be a very big deal to be caught visiting somemedicinewebsite.com/effective-abortion-meds/buy. TLS blocks that bit of information. Today, it still exposes that you're looking at plannedparenthood.com, until if/when TLS_ECH catches on and becomes pervasive. That's a bummer. But you still have plausible deniability to say "I was just looking at it so I could see how evil it was", rather than having to explain why you were checking out "/schedule-an-appointment".
[0]https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/ech/
By bigfatkitten 2025-10-2821:471 reply The CIA’s website was a very early adopter of HTTPS across the board, for this very reason.
Most of the site hosted general information about the agency and its functions, but they also had a section where you could provide information.
By kstrauser 2025-10-2821:51 Great point, and an excellent illustration. If it was trivial for an adversary to see that some people were visiting http://cia.gov/visitor-center-and-gift-shop-hours, but others were visiting https://cia.gov/[we-can't-see-this-part], they'd know exactly who to concentrate their rubber hose cryptography efforts on.
By dns_snek 2025-10-2910:27 > But you still have plausible deniability to say "I was just looking at it so I could see how evil it was", rather than having to explain why you were checking out "/schedule-an-appointment".
TLS traffic analysis can still reveal which pages you accessed with some degree of confidence, based on packet sizes, timings, external resources that differ between pages (e.g. images)
Yes that's why I listed a couple reasons why adopting ECH everywhere is not straightforwardly all good. The network operator one in particular is I think quite important. It happens that the same company with the largest pushes for "privacy" (Google) has also been constantly making it more difficult to make traffic transparent to the actual device owner (e.g. making it so you can't just drop a CA onto your phone and have all apps trust it). Things like DoH, ECH, and ubiquitous TLS (with half the web making an opaque connection to the same Cloudflare IPs) then become weaponized against device owners.
AFAIK it's still not that widely adopted or can be easily blocked/disabled on a network though.
By kaoD 2025-10-2821:05 That sounds like an Android issue, not a TLS issue. If I need to break TLS I can add my own CA. Not having TLS is not the solution. Google will find other ways to take control from you.
There are good arguments for it, but it's also not a coincidence that they happen to align with Google's business objectives. Ex it's hard to issue a TLS cert without notifying Google of it.
By 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2025-10-292:372 reply There are public logs of every TLS cert issued by the major providers. This benefits Google.
Kinda like how Wikipedia benefits Google. Or public roads benefit Uber. Or clean water benefits restaurants
By dns_snek 2025-10-2910:14 Certificate transparency logs are public. How does this benefit Google?
Google also knows about every domain name that gets renewed or registered... How does knowing a website has tls help in any meaningful way that would detract from society as a whole?
The certificate transparency log lets everyone know which domains are active as the certificates are getting renewed, likely more often than the domain itself, and also which sub-domains are active if those are not secured using a wild-card certificate.
Not just Google: AI bots could use the information to look for juicy new data to scrape and ingest.
Probably not a significant thing, the information can be derived in other ways too if someone wants to track these things, but it is a thing.
This doesn't feel like much of an argument in favor of not using https though.
By dspillett 2025-10-3010:42 Not at all IMO, unless you are really paranoid about Google & friends. I was just saying that what was being questioned does (or could) benefit them a tiny bit.
Just because you don't care doesn't mean nobody cares. I don't want anyone snooping on what I browse regardless of how "safe" someone thinks it is.
My navigation habits are boring but they are mine, not anyone else's to see.
A server has no way to know whether the user cares or not, so they are not in a position to choose the user's privacy preferences.
Also: a page might be fully static, but I wouldn't want $GOVERNMENT or $ISP or $UNIVERSITY_IT_DEPARTMENT to inject propaganda, censor... Just because it's safe for you doesn't mean it's safe for everyone.
By msla 2025-10-291:44 And so we got The Usual Conversation:
"I want my communications to be as secure as practical."
"Ah, but they're not totally secure! Which means they're totally insecure! Which means you might as well write your bank statements on postcards and mail them to the town gossip!"
It amazes me how anti-HTTPS some people can be.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2819:424 reply So... do you refuse to use the laptop supplied by your employer?
It does MITM between you and the HTTPS websites you browse.
It doesn't MITM anything. Do you see that as normal? Because I don't. We're adults here and I'm a tech guy, there's zero reason to control anything in my laptop.
In fact it's just a regular laptop that I fully control and installed from scratch, straight out of Apple's store. As all my company laptops have been.
And if it was company policy I would refuse indeed. I would probably not work there in the first place, huge red flag. If I really had to work there for very pressing reasons I would do zero personal browsing (which I don't do anyways).
Not even when I was an intern at random corpo my laptop was MITMed.
My work laptop has a CA from the organization installed and all HTTP(S) traffic is passed through a proxy server which filters all traffic and self-signs all domains with its' CA. It's relatively common for larger organizations. I've seen this in govt and banking.
To provide a European/Dutch perspective: I’m pretty sure that as a small employer myself, I am very much disallowed from using those mechanisms to actually inspect what employees are doing. Automated threat/virus scanning may be a legal gray zone, but monitoring-by-default is very much illegal, and there have been plenty of court cases about this. It is treated similarly to logging and reading all email, Slack messages, constantly screenrecording, or putting security cameras aimed at employees all day long. There may be exceptions for if specific fraud or abuse is suspected, but burden of proof is on the employer and just monitoring everyone is not justifiable even when working with sensitive data or goods.
So to echo a sister comment: while sadly it is common in some jurisdictions, it is definitely not normal.
By tracker1 2025-10-2915:54 I'm literally working for a local govt agency (via contracting company). I'm not sure that anything is being actively monitored so much as it's' blocking a number of sites (anything AI), upload sites, etc. As well as blocking POST actions to non-whitelisted sites/apps.
I've also seen similar configurations in Banking environments having done work for three major banking establishments over the years. The exception was when I was on a platform security team that managed access controls. Similarly at a couple of large airlines.
I know it's common, but I don't think it's "normal" even if it has been "normalized". I wouldn't subject myself to that. If my employer doesn't trust me to act like an adult I don't think it's the place for me.
I could maybe understand it for non-tech people (virus scanning yadda yadda) but for a tech person it's a nuisance at best.
So you want to double the infrastructure surface to provide a different route for access for developers which may be a tiny portion of users in an organization? That's privilege right there.
Edit: I'm not saying I like it this way... but that's what you get when working in a small org in a larger org in a govt office. When I worked in a security team for a bank, we actually were on a separate domain and network. I generally prefer to work untrusted, externally and rely on another team for production deployment workflows, data, etc.
By kaoD 2025-10-2822:07 Indeed I'm quite privileged.
I'm lucky to be a dev both by trade and passion. I like my job, it's cozy, and we're still scarce enough that my employer and I are in a business relationship as equals: I'm just a business selling my services to another business under common terms (which in my case include trusting each other).
By bigfatkitten 2025-10-2820:25 Using an employer-issued computer for anything but work for that employer is foolish, for a multitude of legal and other reasons. Privacy is just one of them.
By dspillett 2025-10-2911:25 > So... do you refuse to use the laptop supplied by your employer?
For things other than work for my employer? Yes.
And work stuff doesn't touch my personal equipment, with the exception that I can connect to the company VPN from my personal laptop to remote to a work machine if I need to do DayJob work remote in an emergency when I don't have the company laptop with me.
> It does MITM between you and the HTTPS websites you browse.
My employer doesn't. Many don't.
Of course many do, but that is them controlling what happens on their equipment and they are usually up front about it. This is quite different to an ISP, shady WiFi operator, or other adversarial network node, inspecting and perhaps modifying what I look at behind my back.
By AndrewStephens 2025-10-2821:31 This is still not that common but I used to work on a commercial web proxy that did exactly this. The only way it works is if the company pushes out a new root certificate via group policy (or something similar) so that the proxy can re-encrypt the data. Users can tell that this is being done by examining the certificate.
But this is mostly a waste of time, these days companies just install agents on each laptop to monitor activity. If you do not own the machine/network you are using then don’t visit sites hat you don’t want them to see.
The issue is that static content only sites do not exist - unless browsers change their stance to disabling long-relied-upon features like Javascript and embedded frames for content served over plain HTTP.
They've taken that strategy with newer enhancements (for instance, you can't use passkeys over non-secured channels), but the bar for widespread breakage of existing deployments is pretty high - even if changes like this make it harder to navigate to those existing deployments.
By layer8 2025-10-2918:01 > The issue is that static content only sites do not exist
You’re exaggerating a bit. I have a static website that hasn’t changed in over 15 years. Okay, not completely static, as one page has a (static) HTML form that creates some file templates as a utility, but everything is working like it did in 2010. Except that I added TLS support at some point so that people don’t get scary warnings.
You just clearly don’t understand it is important that no one injects anything into your code while I am browsing it.
With http it is trivial.
So you say you don’t care if my ISP injects whole bunch of ads and I don’t even see your content but only the ads and I blame you for duping me into watching them.
Nowadays VPN providers are popular what if someone buys VPN service from the shitty ones and gets treated like I wrote above and it is your reputation of your blog devastated.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-2819:592 reply My ISP does not and if yours does, vote with your money or lobby your government to make this illegal.
And while at it, lobby to make corporate MiTM tools illegal as well.
Because if you are bothered about my little blog, you should be bothered that your employer can inspect all your HTTPS traffic.
Or you could do a much simpler thing and support HTTPS and not expect users to change ISPs (which is not always possible, e.g. in rural areas) or change laws (which is even less realistic) to browse your (or any other) blog. Injecting ads has nothing to do with corporate MITM, it's unquestionably bad, but unrelated here.
More to the point: serving your blog with HTTPS via Let's Encrypt does not in any way forbid you from also serving it with HTTP without "depending on third parties to publish content online". It would take away from the drama of the statement though, I suppose.
By ozim 2025-10-307:50 To add to that rouge ISP employees don’t care if it is illegal.
By dns_snek 2025-10-297:35 It's not just your ISP, it's anyone on the entire network path, and on most networks with average security that includes any device on your local network.
>There are dozens of us I guess...
Shine on you crazy diamond, and all that, but...
> I have been continually confused as to why it is being forced down everyone's throat.
Have you never sat on public wifi and tried to open an http site? These days it is highly likely to be MITM'd by the wifi provider to inject ads (or worse). Even residential ISPs that one pays for cannot be trusted not to inject content, if given the opportunity, because they noticed that they are monopolies and most users cannot do anything about it.
You don't get to choose the threat model of those who visit your site.
By sam_lowry_ 2025-10-298:001 reply Have you ever opened your work laptop? It is likely MITM'd so that your employer can see everything you read and post on the internet and HTTPS won't help you.
By DaSHacka 2025-10-2911:59 So? I own more devices than a work laptop. I would like to have privacy and security on those.
By varjag 2025-10-298:24 Have you never sat on public wifi and tried to open an http site? These days it is highly likely to be MITM'd by the wifi provider to inject ads (or worse).
I honestly don't remember a single case where that happened to me. Internet user since 1997.
By homebrewer 2025-10-298:01 Which blog post? If it's anything remotely political or controversial, people have disappeared for that. You can always spot someone on HN who has never stepped outside their cushy life in a liberal democracy. The difference in mentality — between how "you" and "we" see the world — is crazy.
By bigstrat2003 2025-10-2819:512 reply Agreed. I think that the push to make everything HTTPS is completely unnecessary, and in fact counterproductive to security. By throwing scary warnings in front of users when there is no actual security threat, we teach users that the scary warnings don't matter and they just should click past them. Warning when a site doesn't use TLS is a clear cut case of crying wolf.
By dns_snek 2025-10-2910:41 > Warning when a site doesn't use TLS is a clear cut case of crying wolf.
No, it's a warning sign that you may be an active victim of an HTTPS downgrade attack where an attacker is blocking HTTPS communication and presenting you with an HTTP version of the website that you intended to visit, capturing and modifying any information you transmit and receive.
> By throwing scary warnings in front of users when there is no actual security threat
Most of these situations may be innocent but the problem is that they look identical to "actual security threats" so you don't have a choice. If there was a way to distinguish between them we/they would be doing it already.
By ndsipa_pomu 2025-10-299:491 reply What would the alternative be? Not warn users when they're about to login to a website that's pretending to be their bank?
By DaSHacka 2025-10-2912:01 Clearly the alternative is to return to HTTP, as these users are suggesting.
Surprised they're still posting, with their employers being shut down at the moment and all.
By Too 2025-10-2917:58 So instead of depending on one third party, you now depend on every Hotel, ISP and Cafe on the planet. Great compromise.
By dinkelberg 2025-10-2913:10 Would you tolerate using DANE?
By bullen 2025-10-2820:20 I made this to redirect HTTPS to HTTP with whatsapp:
https://multiplayeronlinestandard.com/goto.html (the reason for the domain is I will never waste time on HTTPS but github does it automatically for free up to 100GB/month)
> I noticed that Whatsapp is even worse than Chrome, it opens HTT PS even if I share HTTP links.
Firefox does this when I type in a URL and the server is down. I absolutely hate this behaviour, because I run a bunch of services inside my network.
If I tell my browser ‘fetch http://site.example,’ I mean for it to connect to site.example on HTTP on port 80 nothing more. If there is a web server run ning which wants to redirect me to https://site.example, awesome, but my browser should never assume I mean anything I did not say.)
By dang 2025-10-2921:18 Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email hn@ycombinator.com so I can explain why your comment only appeared here 14 hours after you tried 9 times to post it? :)
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-10-2822:221 reply That's a good point to make, IMHO
What is funny about HTTPS is that early arguments for its existence IIRC were often along the lines of protecting credit card numbers and personal information that needed to be sent during e-commerce
HTTPS may have delivered on this promise. Of course HTTPS is needed for e-commerce. But not all web use is commercial transactions
Today, it's unclear who or what^2 HTTPS is really protecting anymore
For example,
- web users' credit card numbers are widely available, sold on black markets to anyone; "data breaches" have become so common that few people ask why the information was being collected and stored in the first place nor do they seek recourse
- web users' personal information is routinely exfiltrated during web use that is not e-commerce, often to be used in association with advertising services; perhaps the third parties conducting this data collection do not want the traffic to be optionally inspected by web users or competitors in the ad services business
- web users' personal information is shared from one third party to another, e.g., to "data brokers", who operate in relative obscurity, working against the interests of the web users
All this despite "widespread use of encryption", at least for data in transit, where the encryption is generally managed by third parties
When the primary use of third-party mediated HTTPS is to protect data collection, telemetry, surveillance and ad services delivery,^1 it is difficult for me to accept that HTTPS as implemented is primarily for protecting web users. It may benefit some third parties financially, e.g., CA and domainname profiteers, and it may protect the operations of so-called "tech" companies though
Personal information and behavioral data are surreptitiously exfiltrated by so-called "tech" companies whilst the so-called "tech" company's "secrets", e.g., what data they collect, generally remain protected. The companies deal in information they do not own yet operate in secrecy from its owners, relentlessly defending against any requests for transparency
1. One frequent argument for the use of HTTPS put forth by HN commenters has been that it prevents injection of ads into web pages by ISPs. Yet the so-called "tech" companies are making a "business" out of essentially the same thing: injecting ads, e.g., via real-time auctions, into web pages. It appears to this reader that in this context HTTPS is protecting the "business" of the so-called "tech" companies from competition by ISPs. Some web users do not want _any_ ads, whether from ISPs or so-called "tech" companies
2. I monitor all HTTPS traffic over the networks I own using a local forward proxy. There is no plaintext HTTP traffic leaving the network unless I permit it for a specific website in the proxy config. The proxy forces all traffic over HTTPS
If HTTPS were optionally under user control, certainly I would be monitoring HTTPS traffic being automatically sent from own computers on own network to Google by Chrome, Android, YouTube and so on. As I would for all so-called "tech" companies doing data collection, surveillance and/or ad services as a "business"
Ideally one would be able to make an informed decision whether they want to send certain information to companies like Google. But as it stands, with the traffic sometimes being protected from inspection _by the computer owner_, through use of third party-mediated certificates, the computer owner is prevented from knowing what information is being sent
In own case, that traffic just gets blocked
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-11-063:59 O5QXGIBLGEQHI2DFNYQGI33XNYQHI2DFNYQHK4BAORUGK3RAMRXXO3QK
While Google and friends are happy to push for https, it’s dramatically easier to scam people via ads or AI generated content. Claiming plain HTTP is scary seems like a straw man tbh
The threat model of HTTP isn't site owners, it's that anyone else can change the content and you can't tell that it didn't come from the original site.
It's not a strawman, it's a real attack that we've seen for decades.
The entire guidance of "don't connect to an open wireless AP"? That's because a malicious actor who controlled the AP could read and modify your HTTP traffic - inject ads, read your passwords, update the account number you requested your money be transferred to. The vast majority of that threat is gone if you're using HTTPS instead of HTTP.
Then perhaps the problem is open APs? There are still legitimate uses for HTTP including reading static content.
Say we all move to HTTPS but then let’s encrypt goes away, certificate authority corps merge, and then google decides they also want remote attestation for two way trust or whatever - the whole world becomes walled up into an iOS situation. Even a good idea is potentially very bad at the hands of unregulated corps (and this is not a hypothetical)
By array_key_first 2025-10-291:321 reply > There are still legitimate uses for HTTP including reading static content.
This can still be MITM'd. Maybe they can't drain your bank account by the nature of the content, but they can still lie or something. And that's not good.
Or more problematically, inject a bunch of ads that lead users on to scams.
It would be ideal if people only browsed from trusted networks, but telling people "don't do the convenient, useful, obvious thing" only goes so far. Hence the desire to secure connections from another angle.
By ndsipa_pomu 2025-10-2910:12 > Say we all move to HTTPS but then let’s encrypt goes away
Just switch to ZeroSSL - it's the default certificate provider for the acme.sh script now.
> Then perhaps the problem is open APs?
The problem in the above was not actually caused by the AP being open, nor is it just limited to APs in the path between you and whatever you're trying to connect to on the internet. Another common example is ISPs which inject content banners into unencrypted pages (sometimes for billing/usage alerts, other times for ads). Again, this is just another example - you aren't going to whack-a-mole an answer to trusting everything a user might transit on the internet, that's how we came to HTTPS instead.
> There are still legitimate uses for HTTP including reading static content.
There are valid reasons to do a lot of things which don't end up making sense to support in the overall view.
> Say we all move to HTTPS but then let’s encrypt goes away, certificate authority corps merge, and then google decides they also want remote attestation for two way trust or whatever - the whole world becomes walled up into an iOS situation. Even a good idea is potentially very bad at the hands of unregulated corps (and this is not a hypothetical)
There are at least 2 other decent sized independent ACME operators at this point, but say all of the certificate authority corps merge but we planned ahead and kept HTTP support: our banking/payments, sites with passwords, sites with PII, medical sites, etc is in a stranglehold but someone's plain text blog post about it will be accessible without a warning message. Not exactly a great victory, we'll still need to solve the actual problem just as desperately at that point.
.
The biggest gripe I have with the way browsers go about this is they only half consider the private use cases, and you get stuck with the rough edges. E.g. here they call private addresses out to not get a warning, but my (fully in browser, single page) tech support dump reader can't work when opened as a file:/// because the browser built-in for calculating an HMAC (part of WebCrypto) is for secure contexts only, and file:/// doesn't qualify. Apart from being stupid because they aren't getting rid of JavaScript support on file:/// origins until they just get rid of file:/// completely and it just means I need a shim, it's also stupid because file:/// is no less a secure origin than localhost.
I'd like for every possible "unsecure" private use case to work, but I (and the majority of those who uses a browser) also has a conflicting want to connect to public websites securely. The options and impacts for these conflicting desires have to be weighed and thought through.
By Dylan16807 2025-10-294:10 I understand why file:/// is limited in the files it can load, but yeah I have no idea why so many functions are gated off.
At least mongoose will serve stuff in 100KB.
I call this the quicksand theory of network security. The threat is real but the risk overstated by orders of magnitude.
Remember firesheep? [1] [2] Go to a cafe with open WiFi, fire up extension and click on user who you want to impersonate.
Now imagine if we still lived in a world like that. Someone visits UN meeting and the rest is your imagination.
[1] https://nordvpn.com/cybersecurity/glossary/firesheep/?srslti...
By blitzar 2025-10-2910:25 I used to pick peoples email username and passwords off the network in starbucks.
I thought the https push really came in the wake of the snowden disclosures - might be rewriting history however
By Theodores 2025-10-2914:17 It was beforehand, if my memory serves me correctly, by which time GCHQ/NSA had managed to hack it. I can remember the diagrams from the Snowden docs. If https:// did lock out our friendly spies, do you think we would be allowed to have it beyond anything apart from secure checkouts?
I don't like this change. There are a lot of SaaS business that allow you to create a CNAME along the lines of "saas_app_name.yourbusiness.com". For example Fastmail and Zoho do that, our business offers that feature as well. When you arrive at our site we do a redirect to a proper https URL.
But a browser will not accept a redirect from a domain with an incorrect certificate (and rightly so), so this will start failing if https becomes the default, unless we generate certificates for all those customers, many thousands in our case. And then we need to get those certificates to the AWS load balancer where we terminate https (not even sure if it can handle that many). I think we may need to retire that feature.
By ItsHarper 2025-10-2919:21 I don't know your business, but I would never consider using such a feature that didn't support HTTPS all the way through as a business customer. It's not like this can't be done at scale (all custom domains served by Netlify use Let's Encrypt certs, for example).
By 7bit 2025-10-317:14 Sounds like a big excuse.
By 8organicbits 2025-10-2913:141 reply > The news site which stopped updating in 2007, the blog somebody last posted to in 2011, that sort of thing.
Interesting, that hasn't been my experience. There's a certain group of stubborn techies who have active sites lacking HTTPS. One example is Dave Winer's blog:
He's doing some really interesting things over at https://feedland.com, so I'm glad I clicked through the TLS warning on his blog.
By tuhgdetzhh 2025-10-2913:22 There is always someone who has a different experience, but I think Google numbers 95-99% is pretty much correct and websites with decent amount of traffic all have HTTPS.
While this is great for end users, this just shows again what kind of monopoly Google has over the web by owning Chrome.
I work at a company that also happens to run a CDN and the sheer amount of layers Google forces everyone to put onto their stack, which was a very simple text based protocol, is mind boggling.
First there was simple TCP+HTTP. Then HTTPS came around, adding a lot of CPU load onto servers. Then they invented SPDY which became HTTP2, because websites exploded in asset use (mostly JS). Then they reinvented the layer 4 with QUIC (in-house first), which resulted in HTTP3. Now this.
Each of them adding more complexity and data framing onto, what used to be a simple message/file exchange protocol.
And you can not opt out, because customers put their websites into a website checker and want to see all green traffic lights.
By zoeysmithe 2025-10-2914:081 reply >First there was simple TCP+HTTP. Then HTTPS came around, adding a lot of CPU load onto servers.
You can't do e-commerce without encryption. You live under capitalism. Its weird to me to see capitalists not wanting to accept payments for goods. As far as the complexity argument, goes, wait until you see what goes on in your CPU! Or the codebase of your average website. There is no real simplicity and simplicity just ties people's hands.
These weird worship of simplicity just don't make sense. By this argument we should have never left the mainframe green-screen terminal world. Or the PDP era. Or the abacus era for that matter. An arbitrary line drawn in the sense is a near purely emotional appeal and the libertarian housecat meme when applied to technology.
Instead, this is a train with no final destination and those who think overwise are just engaging in nostalgia.
By saurik 2025-10-2914:14 > Its weird to me to see capitalists not wanting to accept payments for goods.
Even the most hardcore capitalists refuse to take our money for their services, insisting on giving away free websites--some which don't even have any authentication at all--that have frustrating business models on the backend :(. The reason we encrypt the vast majority (by volume, not weight) of our web content is for integrity (so random other people can't hijack and modify what we render), and somewhat (but not sufficiently, as TLS is broken) for privacy, not because of some attempt to partake in capitalism.
By IgorPartola 2025-10-2819:173 reply I distinctly remember trying to sign up for Pandora’s premium plan back in 2012 and their credit card form being served and processed over HTTP. I emailed them telling them that I wanted to give them my money if they would just fix the form. They never got back to me or fix it for several more years while I gave my money to Spotify. Back then HTTPS was NOT the norm and it was a battle to switch people to it. Yes it is annoying for internal networks and a few other things but it is necessary.
I remember even back in the early 2000s https for credit card forms was pretty common. Surprised a company like Pandora wasn't with it by thr 2010s.
There is likely zero chance the OP's recollection is remotely correct. Pandora went public in 2011 with 80 million users, the chances of a publicly listed company of this size taking payments over HTTP in 2012 are about as close to zero as can be. If nothing else, their payment processor would drop them as a customer.
By wingman-jr 2025-10-296:362 reply I found this: https://textslashplain.com/2016/03/06/using-https-properly/ Seems like it at least partially corroborates OP's recollection!
By voxic11 2025-10-2914:48 It seems, based on the article in the sibling comment, that Pandora took a overly narrow view of the encryption requirements for working with credit card data. So they served the web pages over HTTP and only used HTTPS for the API calls that transferred the credit card information. This is obviously still insecure because a MITM attack could inject javascript onto the page to steal the data while it was being entered, but at least in the case where an attacker could just read the traffic they might not be able to capture the credit card information.
I can totally believe there were still companies in existence at this time who were still following such misguided interpretations.
By billyhoffman 2025-10-2820:10 In the early to mid 2000s I would believe this. But for a major e-commerce provider in 2012? That seems vanishing improbable.
PCI DSS is the data security standard required by credit card processors for you to be able to accept credit card payments online. Since version 1.0 came out in 2004, Requirement 4.1 has been there, requiring encrypted connections when transmitting card holder information.
There’s certainly was a time when you had two parts of a commerce website: one site all of the product stuff and catalogs and categories and descriptions which are all served over HTTP (www.shop.com) and then usually an entirely separate domain (secure.shop.com) where are the actual checkout process started that used SSL/TLS. This was due to the overhead of SSL in the early 2000s and the cost of certificates. This largely went away once Intel processors got hardware accelerated instructions for things like AES, certificates became more cost-effective, and then let’s encrypt made it simple.
Occasionally during the 2000s and 2010s you might see HTML form that were served over HTTP and the target was an HTTPS URL but even that was rare simply because it was a lot of work to make it that complex instead of having the checkout button just take you to an entirely different site
