Technology

Google announces an increase in HTTPS usage a year after its push to secure websites

Around a year back, Google began its initiative of cracking down on non-secure websites by explicitly marking them as such in its Chrome browser, the most widely used browser worldwide with around 60 percent market share. The change was rolled out in two phases with the first phase marking HTTP sites collecting passwords and credit card information as Not Secure while the second phase began flagging all HTTP sites accepting any kind of information as well as all HTTP sites opened in Chrome’s Incognito Mode as such.

Now, in a newly released report as part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Googe has shared some statistics on how effective the crackdown has really been. According to Google, 64 percent of traffic on Chrome is now secure, up from 42 percent a year ago. Additionally, HTTPS usage on Mac and Chrome OS has risen from 60 and 67 percent last year respectively to above 75 percent for both the platforms. Finally, 71 out of the top 100 websites use HTTPS, up from 37 the year before.

Google has also seen an uptick in HTTPS usage across countries all over the world. As an example, Google stated that HTTPS usage in Japan has shot up to 55 percent as against the 31 percent last year while HTTPS usage in Brazil is similarly up to 66 percent from the previous year’s 50 percent. In its home market, the US, 73 percent of sites are now HTTPS, up from 59 percent last year. Google also cited specific examples of such major adopters of HTTPS as Rakuten, Cookpad, Ameblo and Yahoo Japan in contributing to the surge in HTTPS usage.

To make the transition to HTTPS easier, Google has tied up with Let’s Encrypt to ensure that the migration to the secure protocol remains inexpensive and easy to achieve. Additionally, Google has also secured entire first-level domains .foo and .dev. You can read the entire release through the source link below.