Google will also continue to support tls 1.0 and 1.1 in Chrome for a little longer

After Microsoft and Mozilla, Google has also decided to continue supporting tls 1.0 and 1.1 a little longer. It hasn’t been officially announced, but the support freeze has shifted from Chrome 81, due out next week, to Chrome 83, due out at the end of May.

This is evident from the webpage Deprecations and removals in Chrome 81, which was recently supplemented with the text ‘the removal of tls 1.0 and tls 1.1 has been delayed until Chrome 83, which is expected to be released at the end of May 2020’. That adjustment to the schedule appears to have been made sometime earlier this month. Chrome 81 is scheduled for release in the coming week. Version 82 has been canceled due to the corona crisis. This way, the development team gets a reduction in the burden.

A reduction in the burden may not be the reason for postponing the farewell to these TLS versions. Since Mozilla and Microsoft had already made the move, this puts Google at the disadvantage of being the only one of these big three to refuse to list certain sites. However, Google itself does not make any statements about the why of this postponement. Microsoft bases the postponement on the ‘current global circumstances’ and Mozilla wants to keep government websites accessible during the corona pandemic that still use the old protocols.

The major browser builders announced at the same time in 2018 that they would be turning off support for tls 1.0 and 1.1 in early 2020. Tls stands for transport layer security and is a standard for the encryption of web traffic. Tls 1.0 and 1.1 are outdated web standards that are rarely used. The first version of tls dates from about twenty years ago.