The change will take effect starting with Chrome 68

Feb 8, 2018 18:45 GMT  ·  By

In an attempt to make the Web more secure and also make more Internet users adopt its Chrome web browser, Google announced today that future Chrome releases would mark all HTTP sites as "Not Secure."

The search giant published a statement today on its Chromium blog to inform all Chrome users that the upcoming Google Chrome 68 release that will be out later in the year will automatically mark all HTTP sites as "Not secure."

It's Google's attempt to "force" more websites and webmasters to move their domains to the more secure HTTPS (Secure HTTP) protocol that is being adopted by more and more sites each day. HTTPS it known to offer the best encryption these days.

"For the past several years, we’ve moved toward a more secure Web by strongly advocating that sites adopt HTTPS encryption," said Google in the statement. "Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”."

More than a year ago, Google introduced a function in its proprietary web browser to mark HTTP web pages that collected sensitive information from users, such as credit card information or passwords, as non-secure, with the Chrome 56 release, as part of a long-term plan.

That plan continues to grow with the upcoming release of the Chrome 68 web browser, which present users a "Not secure" badge on the omnibox for all HTTP web pages and sites. Chrome 68 is expected to arrive sometime this summer.

Over 68 percent of Chrome traffic is now protected, says Google

In today's statement, Google also showed the progress made since the introduction of the "Non-secure" feature for HTTP sites, saying that more than 68 percent of Chrome traffic is now protected on both Windows and Android platforms.

In addition, over 78 percent of Chrome traffic is now protected on macOS and Chrome OS platforms, according to Google's statistics, which also reveal the fact that 81 of the top 100 sites on the Internet use the HTTPS protocol by default.

Developers who haven't managed to migrate their sites to the more secure HTTPS protocol are invited to do so using the latest Node CLI version of Lighthouse, Google's in-house built automated tool for improving web pages, within Chrome.

Unfortunately, it will take a few more years until HTTPS will become the standard for all sites, but Google promises to do all they can to make its adoption a breeze for webmasters and developers, as well as to make Chrome users understand that all HTTP sites are not secure.