With the increase in adoption of HTTPS and web browsers offering native controls, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has decided to put its popular browser extension HTTPS Everywhere to maintenance mode in 2022. The company says the aim of the extension launch 10 years back is to make it redundant.
What is HTTPS Everywhere?
HTTPS Everywhere is an extension available for web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi The extension when installed tries to load HTTP sites over HTTPS whenever possible.
When the extension was initially available, most of the websites doesn’t support HTTPS.
Since Mozilla, Google, Microsoft joined hands to increase HTTPS adoption on the web, HTTPS turning out to be unnecessary. It does not only have a lot of sites that were moved to HTTPS from HTTP in recent years but web browsers offering a setting to load pages via secure connection if possible with HTTPS-only mode or HTTPS-first mode. Firefox offers it, so do Microsoft Edge and Chrome.
So, enabling the HTTPS-only mode setting is all users need to do in web browsers going forward, they can remove the HTTPS everywhere extension now.
“The goal of HTTPS everywhere was always to become redundant. That would mean we’d achieved our larger goal: a world where HTTPS is broadly available and accessible that users no longer need an extra browser extension to get it. Now that world is closer than ever, with mainstream browsers offering native support for HTTPS-only mode.”
HTTPS Everywhere to enter Maintenance mode in 2022
EFF says HTTPS Everywhere will be in maintenance mode throughout 2022. The company promises to inform users about native HTTPS-only mode options in the browser before fully sunsetting the extension.
Running HTTPS-only mode and HTTPS Everywhere together
Google recently released Chrome 94 with HTTPS-only mode for desktop and android. You need to visit Security settings and toggle the “Always use secure connection” option to enable the feature
You shouldn’t be running HTTPS Everywhere with HTTPS-Only enabled in in web browser as both may conflict with each other. It is better to remove the extension than to disable the setting.
As of now, some of the web browser vendors don’t have enough confidence to force HTTPS in the browser by default. This may take some time for HTTPS-only mode to become the default in every web browser that supports it, be it be Firefox or Microsoft Edge.
Do you know or used HTTPS Everywhere in the past? Let us know in the comments below
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