Enlarge / We had trouble even finding HTTPS statistics earlier than 2016—but even in 2016, fewer than one in four websites were delivered via HTTPS. (credit: HTTP Archive)
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it will deprecate its HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin in 2022. Engineering director Alexis Hancock summed it up in the announcement’s own title: “HTTPS is actually everywhere.”
The EFF originally launched HTTPS Everywhere—a plugin which automatically upgrades HTTP connections to HTTPS—in 2010 as a stopgap measure for a world that was still getting accustomed to the idea of encrypting all web-browser traffic.
When the plugin was new, the majority of the Internet was served up in plaintext—vulnerable to both snooping and manipulation by any entity which could place itself between a web-browsing user and the web servers they communicated with. Even banking websites frequently offered unencrypted connections! Thankfully, the web-encryption landscape has changed dramatically in the 11 years since then.
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