Google has been a big proponent of HTTPS adoption by marking HTTP sites as “Not secure” in Chrome. That successful push is now extending to Google Registry with a new educational safe.page that provides a good explainer of the importance of HTTPS. Meanwhile, Google is also hosting a website design contest with Pixel 3 prizes.
Trust on the internet is derived from Certificate Authorities that issue digital certificates to verify that users are actually visiting legitimate sites. Over the years, Google and other browsers have removed authorities that fail to be up to par, with Chrome now pushing a new Certificate Transparency Policy that comes into effect today.
Noting the foundational importance of HTTPS in the evolution of the web going forward, Google is now operating its own Root Certificate Authority. Responsible for authenticating the identity of websites, Google Trust Services will operate certificates on behalf of Google and Alphabet.
Many of Google’s services are served over HTTPS, with YouTube and Calendar being the latest to offer encryption by default. With the majority of the web now moving to this security standard, Chrome will begin explicitly labeling HTTP connections as non-secure…
Earlier this year, Google added a new section to their Transparency Report about services adopting HTTPS. With Search, Gmail, and Drive long serving pages over HTTPS, YouTube and Calendar are the latest products to offer encryption by default.
Google has announced that it’s rolling out a new feature in Chrome 48 beta so that developers can better find and fix issues hindering their sites from showing as ‘secure’. The new Security Panel in DevTools will help web developers deploy HTTPS web pages more easily by showing connection information for every network request, and indicating whether or not they’re secure.
Devs will be able to see an overview of any given page. Secure pages will be indicated as such by a green lock, or green dot. Non-secure pages will have a yellow/orange triangle and will have information indicating why that particular page isn’t classed as secure.
This overview shows whether the page has a valid certificate, a secure TLS connection, as well as whether or not there’s any mixed content (aka if it loads insecure HTTP subresources). If there is mixed content, you can easily see what it is, and fix it.
Google launched the new Security Panel to replace the old ‘Connection Info’ tab which the company stated was too complicated for most users, but too basic for most devs. It didn’t make it clear exactly what was causing a site or page to show as non-secure.
Security Panel was originally shown off at the Chrome Dev Summit, where Emily Stark, a Google software engineer showed off the new tool in detail:
[youtube = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WuP4KcDBpI]
Security Panel in DevTools will begin its rollout over the next few days.
HTTPS has become the rule, rather than the exception to the rule, in recent years. And in an effort to usher in the encrypted and more-secure communication protocol, Google announced last month that it would begin prioritizing HTTPS sites over HTTP sites when indexing the web. Unsurprisingly, Google is also slowly-but-surely making sure all of its own web properties use HTTPS over standard HTTP. Google’s cached pages available on the search site are now part of the club…
Google is a security conscious company and by default all their sites are served over a more secure HTTPS connection that prevents nefarious people from looking at your traffic. Today, they have announced that they will begin to prioritize HTTPS websites when crawling them.
Google says it has been testing changes to its search algorithms that will give secure, encrypted websites — as shown by HTTPS in their URL — ranking preference over those that do not. Google as a company prioritizes security, and as more and more webmasters are adopting HTTPS, the company hopes that this change will push more webmasters to do the same.