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 (a web page) is loaded over a secure HTTPS connection, but there are resources (such as images, videos, css, scripts) loaded over an unsecured HTTP connection. This is called mixed content because both HTTP and HTTPS content are loaded on the same page. Modern browsers display prealerts 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 preventing users from having full access on a website, they have also scared off many webmasters who are considering switching to HTTPS, who don't want to lose clicks. Dealing with mixed content errors in web browsers is probably the last major hurdle to getting all administrators to switch to HTTPS. So this week, Google engineers started an experiment in Chrome by setting the browser to automatically upgrade any mixed content to full HTTPS. Google Chrome will do this by secretly changing the URL of unencrypted links (images, videos, css, scipts) from HTTP to HTTPS. If there is the same archive with an HTTPS connection, then everything will work fine. If not, then Chrome will log the error and run one of the many scripts configured for this experiment (analytically here). At present, Google intends to run the above experiment on one percent of all users of the release Canary of Chrome that have enabled the: chrome://flags/#enable-origin-trials flag