September 28, 2021

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently announced that it would phase out its HTTPS Everywhere plugin beginning in 2022. The plugin automatically updates HTTP connections to HTTPS.

While many factors have influenced the EFF’s move to deprecate the plugin, the main factor revolves around the fact that the four major consumer browsers, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, now perform an automatic upgrade from HTTP to HTTPS natively.

Safari remains the only mainstream browser to force HTTPS traffic by default, as other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome offer a native “HTTPS Only” mode that must be user-enabled, while Edge browser already includes an experimental “Automatic HTTPS” that can be found in its Edge 92 version.

Those who want to enable HTTPS Only/Automatic HTTPS natively in their preferred browser should visit the announcement of EFF, which provides step-by-step instructions for each browser. Once native HTTPS upgrade functionality is enabled, users can then disable the HTTPS Everywhere plugin.

For more information, read the original story in Arstechnica.