Shield Icon on Chrome’s Omnibox Shows “ This Page has insecure content”

If you’re wondering why Chrome is showing grayed out Shield icon for certain websites in the address bar next to bookmark icon when you hover your mouse pointer over with the message “ this page has insecure content”, let me tell you these are latest security and UI enhancements Chrome team bought to recent Chrome 21 stable channel to let the user know the page has insecure content or not fully secured.

This shield icon is non-intrusive where in the past Chrome has shown info bar on top with the message “This page has insecure content” load anyway or don’t load (recommended)“ and some times you may have seen red skull with crossbones icon with https being crossed out in address bar, this sent scary message to user that’s why they removed the skull and showed https with lock icon next to it crossed in older versions.

Chrome team blocked mixed scripting vulnerabilities by default for dev. and Beta versions by default for an year which they rolled out to stable to channel this month. The websites where you enter username and password are connected to your Computer via a secure connection, the information pass from your Computer to and website to website servers is encrypted.

Where some secured websites have some vulnerabilities which they don’t fix and Chrome took the responsibility of warning the user with indications mentioned above that this page has insecure content, where some parts of content coming to websites from insecure sources, “these resources can be seen by others during transit and can be modified by an attacker to change the look of the page” Google blocks or prevents these insecure sources from loading then Chrome shows the Shield icon.

You can override that alert by clicking on shield icon and selecting load anyway which is not recommended, then Chrome refreshes that page and loads the content including insecure one and shows with https crossed out next to domain name (check the screenshot below),  the safe way is you can close that website or navigate away and do a favor to website by informing the webmaster that his site is not secured properly.