Google Will Soon Let You Know By Default When Websites Are Unencrypted (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Permanent changes are planned for future Google Chrome releases, which will add a big shiny red cross in the URL bar if the website you're accessing is not using HTTPS. Google says it is planning to add this to Chrome by the end of 2016, after one of its developers proposed the idea back in December 2014. Many have argued that the web is predominantly unencrypted, so they're displaying a persistent and ambiguous error message for a large portion of the Internet. Since unencrypted content is not an error state, the Chrome team should use alternate iconography, because the default error message this will just confuse average people, and it will encourage error blindness.

Comments

Wait...

[RJFerret]

So we used to have a simple system, see http:/// on the URL bar, or see https:/// on the bar.

Then some idiot got the bright idea of hiding the start of the URL, so users could be ignorant or infuriated.

Now they are going to use another symbol to indicate the lack of an "s"?

Have I really got this right?

(Hopefully in the future the symbol will be clarified by replacing it with a sequence of letters.)