Google announced that it plans to mark all HTTP sites as "Not Secure" in Chrome, starting in July 2018 and launching Google Chrome version 68.
The company's decision comes after the increase in adoption of the HTTPS protocol among website developers, and therefore a large part of today's data traffic on them is now encrypted.
Google said that 68% of site traffic through Chrome on both Android and Windows, and 78% of Chrome on both Chrome OS and Mac, is now over HTTPS. The decision to mark all HTTP sites as “Not Secure” in the URL bar is part of the company’s broader strategy.
The first stage of this plan began with Chrome 56, when Google marked all HTTP pages as “Not Secure” if they contained password fields or card payment functionality.
The second stage took place with Chrome 62, when Google marked all HTTP pages opened in a private browsing window as “Not Secure.”.
The release of Chrome 68 in July will mark the third and final phase of this process.
Google is not alone in this decision. Mozilla began this process in December of last year but has not announced a date for when this new policy will be fully activated.
Finally, in its announcement, it informs us that it has improved the open source tool “Lighthouse” to include checks for settings related to a website's HTTPS protocol.
