Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it will deprecate its HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin in 2022. Engineering director Alexis Hancock summed it up in the announcement’s own title: “HTTPS is actually everywhere.”
The EFF originally launched HTTPS Everywhere—a plugin which automatically upgrades HTTP connections to HTTPS—in 2010 as a stopgap measure for a world that was still getting accustomed to the idea of encrypting all web-browser traffic.
When the plugin was new, the majority of the Internet was served up in plaintext—vulnerable to both snooping and manipulation by any entity which could place itself between a web-browsing user and the web servers they communicated with. Even banking websites frequently offered unencrypted connections! Thankfully, the web-encryption landscape has changed dramatically in the 11 years since then.