A few thingz
Joseph Basquin
07/11/2024
#https
Browsers, please don't kill HTTP
I don't share Jeff Atwood's enthusiasm about HTTPS / encryption. What will happen if HTTPS becomes the standard and if HTTP is considered by browsers as "unsafe"?
It seems to me that then, the web will be separated in 2 worlds: professional websites who can afford SSL certificates and a dedicated team to maintain the certification process ... and the average small webmaster who just has a shared hosting and a Wordpress. The latter will be slowly "pushed out of internet" with the threatening notice Not secure
.
Even with the free Let's Encrypt initiative, maintaining HTTPS requires technicity, much more than what the average webmaster has.
Result: if HTTPS becomes the standard and normal HTTP is alerted by browsers as unsafe by default, this will slowly kill amateur content, citizen-powered content.
Welcome to even-more centralized internet. Be sure Facebook and other big content providers will like this.
Edit (2018): I'm finally using LetsEncrypt too... In short, a2enmod ssl ; wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto ; chmod a+x certbot-auto ; ./certbot-auto
does most of the work. More to read here.