Home > News

Google Chrome to Start Displaying Warnings on All HTTP Websites

By Laura Tucker
google-chrome-http-warning-featured

While at one point nearly every website we visited started with the prefix “HTTP,” that’s not the case anymore. It’s seen as less safe, so the Google Chrome web browser is going to start warning its users when it hits a site that is still HTTP.

Also read: MTE Explains: The Difference Between HTTP and HTTPS

HTTP vs. HTTPS

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s been used on websites since the World Wide Web was invented more than a quarter century ago. Back then they never could have imagined the potential problems that could come with visiting a website that wasn’t secure.

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) can be much safer to use, as like the name says, it’s more secure because it’s encrypted.

“Using HTTP for a website instead of HTTPS has always been problematic,” said the head of cryptography at Cloudflare, Nick Sullivan. “Every interaction you have with a website that is unencrypted is broadcasted to an unknown set of companies in arbitrary locations across the globe.”

“This is a massive privacy problem. It’s also a security problem because the website content can be modified along the way without the user knowing. This invites intermediaries to insert ads, trackers, or malicious software to websites.”

news-chrome-http-warning-www

With HTTP websites, nefarious individuals can

  • Insert other content such as ads that aren’t supposed to be on the websites
  • Insert software that a user can’t see that will mine cryptocurrency
  • Use DNS hijacking to redirect visitors to fake websites that will intercept their login info

Even some nations that have governments that control their Internet, such as Egypt and China, can take advantage of the weakness of HTTP.

The United States is against strong encryption techniques, with FBI Director Christopher Wray claiming strong encryption on mobile phones prevents law enforcement from having access to evidence.

Google Chrome 68, 69, 70

But Google wants to warn you when visit a less secure HTTP site. And for that reason, with the release of Chrome 68 on July 24, the browser will begin to warn users when it connects with an unencrypted HTTP website.

Chrome will display the words “not secure” next to the URL in the address bar for websites that are not encrypted. It doesn’t necessarily mean harm will come to you if you visit the website, however. But it may be annoying enough that website owners may want to update their sites to the HTTPS standard.

news-chrome-http-warning-https

However, with Chrome 68 in September, instead of seeing the green padlock icon and the word “secure” on HTTPS connections, you’ll only see a black padlock. It seems they want us to realize that a website being secure shouldn’t be something special.

In October, Chrome 70 will be released, and the “not secure” warning in the address bar will then be displayed in a red color to be more alarming to you.

As far as other browsers, Mozilla says when they have a timeline for marking HTTP connections, they will announce it. Safari doesn’t show any alert, and the Edge browser shows an icon for HTTP connections. When it’s clicked, it offers a warning about the website not being encrypted.

Choices

The important thing to remember here is that everyone has choices. Just as website owners have a choice whether to update their site from HTTP to the encrypted HTTPS, you have a choice on whether to use Google Chrome with its new escalating warning system or use a browser that isn’t so obtrusive.

If you travel up to your address bar in whatever browser you are reading this article in, you’ll see that Make Tech Easier is secure with HTTPS.

What do you think about these warnings from Google Chrome? Do you think it will bother you to be warned every time you enter a non-secure website? Or will you be glad that they are taking the steps to warn you: Let us know what you think in our comments section below.

Image credit: Closeup on the screen with depth of field and focus on the padlock by ktsdesign/Shutterstock

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.