Google Chrome 68, will you lose business?
Google promised this several months ago to give people time to get their sites secure and will now be advising users that the HTTP sites they are looking for are not Secure and provide an option to go back to safety.
Until recently, Google has only marked a small number of sites as being not secure. This was the soft rollout that would provide developers and website owners with a little more time to transition their sites to a more secure connection. However, the latest version of Google's browser, Chrome 68, will now mark ALL unencrypted sites.
Customers who land on an unencrypted site/page will see the “Not Secure” label that appears on the URL bar and a window with a warning will pop-up when customers click on the label. This pop-up advises users not to enter any sensitive information onto the website. The warning is more of a call to action to developers/website owners to adopt the HTTPS protocols and get an SSL installed on their site. It is not a sign that the user has been compromised.
Google has been pushing and advising developers/website owners for years to change to HTTPS, and each browser version moves slightly closer to the end goal of Google's agenda. After all don't forget that HTTPS sites are more secure. They can prevent many things from malware attacks, stop cryptocurrency mining, and limit third-parties from utilising targeted-ads.
So far, Google appears to be successful in making the Internet a safer place for everyone. According to some online stats in February, more than 68% of traffic on Chrome was protected on Android and Windows while the numbers were more than 10% higher on Mac Computers and the Chrome OS. Take a look at the top 100 sites, nearly all of them are now following HTTPS protocols.
Go ahead search for your product or service to see this for yourself. We tested this, and 99% of the page 1 results were secured with an installed SSL certificate.
We have no doubt there are still more changes to come from Google. A new version is set for release in September and users can expect to see the Secure label as being a less apparent black colour. However, the Not Secure tag in the URL will reportedly be displayed in red when Chrome 70 arrives in early October.
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