Google Says 64 Percent of Chrome Traffic On Android Now Protected With HTTPS, 75 Percent On Mac, 66 Percent On Windows (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google's push to make the web more secure by flagging sites using insecure HTTP connections appears to be working. The company announced today that 64 percent of Chrome traffic on Android is now protected, up 42 percent from a year ago. In addition, over 75 percent of Chrome traffic on both ChromeOS and Mac is now protected, up from 60 percent on Mac and 67 percent on ChromeOS a year ago. Windows traffic is up to 66 percent from 51 percent. Google also notes that 71 of the top 100 websites now use HTTPS by default, up from 37 percent a year ago. In the U.S., HTTPS usage in Chrome is up from 59 percent to 73 percent. Combined, these metrics paint a picture of fairly rapid progress in the switchover to HTTPS. This is something that Google has been heavily pushing by flagging and pressuring sites that hadn't yet adopted HTTPS.

Comments

Re:Is this to control who is allowed a Web site?

[swillden]

why should a cat meme site need https for example

To protect the users of the cat meme site from malicious parties on the network between their browser and the cat meme site. I don't mean to keep the cat memes secret, obviously that doesn't matter much. The purpose is to ensure that the code executed by the user's browser is the code sent by the cat meme site, not something else intended to exploit browser vulnerabilities to hijack the user's computer.

For lots of sites we could use a TLS cipher suite that doesn't actually encrypt anything. It's the authenticity and integrity properties of TLS that are valuable for every site. Encryption only matters for some.