EFF stops developing Https Everywhere browser extension

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will stop further development of its Https Everywhere browser extension at the end of this year. According to the makers, the protocol is natively supported by enough browsers to stop development.

From next year, the extension will be placed in maintenance mode until the end of 2022. After that, development will be definitively stopped and the Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends surfing through browsers that offer a native https-only mode such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge.

The Https Everywhere extension prevents browsers from establishing insecure HTTP connections by pointing to a domain name that supports the more secure HTTPS protocol. An Https connection makes it more difficult for malicious parties to intercept information exchanged while browsing. If it is not possible to establish a secure connection, the user is warned. He or she can then choose to continue navigating to the website or to surf to another website.

The first version of the Https Everywhere extension was released in 2010 as a public beta for the Firefox web browser. As of April this year, the EFF moved to DuckDuckGo’s Smarter Encryption database and stopped adding lines to the database of websites it knows had encrypted HTTPS versions. It was also announced that the extension would be phased out later this year.