EFF will remove the HTTPS Everywhere extension as HTTPS is now ubiquitous. The Electronic Frontier Foundation Announces Preparing to Withdraw Famous HTTPS Everywhere Browser Extension after the increase in HTTPS adoption and since many browsers have already added HTTPS only functions.
"After the end of this year, the extension will go into 'maintenance mode' for 2022," said Alexis Hancock, Director of Engineering at EFF.
Maintenance status means the extension will receive minor bug fixes next year, but no new features or further development.
An official expiration date has not yet been decided, a date after which no extension updates will be provided.
The HTTPS Everywhere browser extension was launched in June 2010, and is one of the most successful browser extensions ever released. The extension allowed automatic switching of web links from HTTP to HTTPS if the sites had an HTTPS option available. Once released, it helped a lot to upgrade site links to HTTPS when users clicked HTTP links or typed domains into their browser without setting the prefix "https: //".
So the extension was loved by privacy advocates and was originally integrated into the Tor browser. After that, it was added to many browsers that made privacy a priority.
But as of 2010, HTTPS is no longer a marginal technology. Today, about 86,6% of all websites on the Internet have HTTPS connections.
Browser makers such as Chrome and Mozilla have reported that HTTPS traffic typically accounts for 90% to 95% of their daily connections.
However, efforts to improve HTTPS adoption have not been made at the web level. Since 2020, several major browser manufacturers have launched operations HTTPS-only, where the browser tries to upgrade the connection from HTTP to HTTPS on its own or displays an error message to users if no HTTPS connection is found. This is what HTTPS Everywhere has been doing for over a decade.
HTTPS-only features are now available in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari. But you have to enable them from the settings.
