The Google Chrome team will be running an experiment this week in an attempt to find out solutions in an HTTPS problem which the Mozilla Foundation also tried to resolved last year.
The problem that Google is trying to solve in Chrome is called "mixed content", which Google describes as follows:
Mixed content is displayed when an original HTML (a by clicking here) is loaded over a secure HTTPS connection, but there are e.gterms (such as images, videos, css, scripts) that are loaded over an insecure HTTP connection. This is called mixed content because both HTTP and HTTPS content are loaded on the same page. Modern browsers display warnings for this type of content to indicate to the user that this page also contains unsafe content.
In recent years, mixed content has become a major issue for browser builders as well websites using HTTPS.
The mixed content errors of the content browser, in addition to blocking them users to have full access to a website have also scared off many webmasters who are considering switching to HTTPS, who don't want to miss clicks. Troubleshooting mixed content appearing in web browsers is perhaps the last major obstacle to persuading all administrators to switch to HTTPS. So this week, Google engineers started an experiment in Chrome by setting up a browser to automatically upgrade any mixed content to full HTTPS. Google Chrome will do this by secretly changing the URL of non-encrypted links (images, videos, css, scipts) from HTTP to HTTPS. If there is the same file as an HTTPS connection, then everything will work fine. If it doesn't, then Chrome will log the error and run one of the many scripts configured for this experiment (analytically here). At this time, Google intends to run the above experiment on one percent of all Canary Chrome users who have enabled: chrome: // flags / # enable-origin-trial flag
