This is for everyone with a certificate
Mozilla—like Google before them—have announced their plans for deprecating HTTP in favour of HTTPS. I’m all in favour of moving to HTTPS. I’ve done it myself here on adactio.com, on thesession.org, and on huffduffer.com. I have some concerns about the potential linkrot involved in the move to TLS everywhere—as outlined by Tim Berners-Lee—but still, anything that makes the work of GCHQ and the NSA more difficult is alright by me.
But I have a big, big problem with Mozilla’s plan to “encourage” the move to HTTPS:
Gradually phasing out access to browser features.
Requiring HTTPS for certain browser features makes total sense, given the security implications. Service Workers, for example, are quite correctly only available over HTTPS. Any API that has access to a device sensor—or that could be used for fingerprinting in any way—should only be available over HTTPS. In retrospect, Geolocation should have been HTTPS-only from the beginning.
But to deny access to APIs where there are no security concerns, where it is merely a stick to beat people with …that’s just wrong.
This is for everyone. Not just those smart enough to figure out how to add HTTPS to their site. And yes, I know, the theory is that is that it’s going to get easier and easier, but so far the steps towards making HTTPS easier are just vapourware. That makes Mozilla’s plan look like something drafted by underwear gnomes.
The issue here is timing. Let’s make HTTPS easy first. Then we can start to talk about ways of encouraging adoption. Hopefully we can figure out a way that doesn’t require Mozilla or Google as gatekeepers.
Sven Slootweg outlines the problems with Mozilla’s forced SSL. I highly recommend reading Yoav’s post on deprecating HTTP too. Ben Klemens has written about HTTPS: the end of an era …that era being the one in which anyone could make a website without having to ask permission from an app store, a certificate authority, or a browser manufacturer.
On the other hand, Eric Mill wrote We’re Deprecating HTTP And It’s Going To Be Okay. It makes for an extremely infuriating read because it outlines all the ways in which HTTPS is a good thing (all of which I agree with) without once addressing the issue at hand—a browser that deliberately cripples its feature set for political reasons.