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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine dept.

Phoronix reports the Mozilla Security Engineering team is planning to make their browser useless for browsing much of the World Wide Web, by deprecating insecure HTTP.

Richard Barnes of Mozilla writes:

In order to encourage web developers to move from HTTP to HTTPS, I would like to propose establishing a deprecation plan for HTTP without security. Broadly speaking, this plan would entail limiting new features to secure contexts, followed by gradually removing legacy features from insecure contexts. Having an overall program for HTTP deprecation makes a clear statement to the web community that the time for plaintext is over -- it tells the world that the new web uses HTTPS, so if you want to use new things, you need to provide security.

See also this document outlining the initial plans.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:55AM (#170835)

    Well, they are already trying for quite some time to make their browser useless.

    First, they tried it by leaking memory left and right. Then they tried to get rid of their users by regularly breaking extensions. Then they decided to alienate them by radically changing their interface from time to time, to prevent people getting too familiar to the browser.

    But it seems, now they have found the best way to make people abandon their browser: Just make it not work for the web sites people visit!

    On a more serious note: Such a tactics can work if you are the clear market leader. But the clear market leader currently is Chrome, with Firefox going down like crazy (only IE goes down faster, but then, they started from a higher level). Providers of HTTP web sites will barely notice the difference (unless they specifically provide Firefox related stuff). However users of Firefox will notice big time, and have a great incentive to switch to another browser.

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  • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:39PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:39PM (#171118) Journal

    Mozilla's continued market share decline and braindead copycatting of Chrome shows that the product managers over there are a big part of the problem. It's inexplicable that new major versions still break extensions when there are new major versions on a regular basis. They could use some of Ballmer's advice: Developers, developers, developers!

    Fortunately Pale Moon is a more traditional variant that takes the security patches without the Chrome-ified interface, and it works with all the extensions I've tried. I would assume they would not include this "security" change.

    Does it really matter if my ISP knows I'm reading the Daily Mail and which stories? They're going to see DNS lookups and traffic to the Daily Mail's servers even if it is encrypted.