The Google Chrome team will conduct an experiment this week in an attempt to find solutions to an HTTPS problem that 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 occurs when an original HTML (website) is uploaded via a secure HTTPS connection but there are resources (such as images, videos, css, scripts) uploaded via an unsecure HTTP connection. This is called mixed content because both HTTP and HTTPS content is loaded on the same page. Modern browsers show warnings about this type of content to indicate to the user that this page also contains insecure content.
In recent years, mixed content is a big problem for browser makers and websites using HTTPS.
Content browser mixed content bugs, in addition to preventing users from having full access to a site, have frightened and many webmasters who are thinking of changing 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
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
