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Mozilla Restricts All New Firefox Features To HTTPS Only (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In a groundbreaking statement earlier this week, Mozilla announced that all web-based features that will ship with Firefox in the future must be served on over a secure HTTPS connection (a "secure context"). "Effective immediately, all new features that are web-exposed are to be restricted to secure contexts," said Anne van Kesteren, a Mozilla engineer and author of several open web standards. This means that if Firefox will add support for a new standard/feature starting tomorrow, if that standard/feature carries out communications between the browser and an external server, those communications must be carried out via HTTPS or the standard/feature will not work in Firefox. The decision does not affect already existing standards/features, but Mozilla hopes all Firefox features "will be considered on a case-by-case basis," and will slowly move to secure contexts (HTTPS) exclusively in the future.
...Just... what are they thinking?...
Who knows if they are even thinking at all. The crowd that currently appears to be in charge at Mozilla seems to have a really strange perception of what the Firefox users want, and a strange perception of security. Yesterday I tried to log into the Mozilla site, but I was not allowed to because I would not let Mozilla persistently store tracking data on my PC. I allowed session cookies, but that wasn't good enough for them. Apparently they wanted access to offline web content storage.
The LAN issue is an interesting one, maybe Firefox should make an exception for the private IP addresses ranges. That would be reasonable. On the other hand, I am all for HTTPS for everything else, even eventually dropping non-SSL support altogether.