Mozilla has busied itself doing the same for Firefox. Realising all this was becoming an issue as the web got more complicated, Google kicked off the secure contexts initiative in 2014, gradually adding these requirements to Chrome. Wouldn’t it be simpler to make all sites use HTTPS and be done with it?Īlthough HTTPS secures the browser’s connection to a website, a non-HTTPS function could still be opened in a separate window without that insecurity being obvious to the user. These could all work over HTTP, of course, but that would represent a security risk that attackers could exploit to steal credentials, track users, and intercept data using man-in-the-middle ruses. (Another three – the AppCache API, Device motion/orientation, and Fullscreen – will follow in time.) Service Workers used for background sync and notification.Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).Google’s Brotli web compression algorithm.These mostly hidden functions currently include: The principle of secure contexts is an incredibly simple one – that certain powerful web capabilities and APIs (whose risks users are often barely aware of) should be forced to work over HTTPS. This could be about to change thanks to the publicity generated by the much better-known campaign by Google and others to migrate websites from insecure HTTP connections to encrypted HTTPS. The odd thing is that while secure contexts (also called ‘secure origins’) matter a lot to end user security, almost nobody beyond web devs has ever heard of the mechanism or pondered why it might be a big deal. This isn’t a surprise – Mozilla mandated that security-sensitive geolocation be added as a secure context last March – but the signal is still significant.Īll the building blocks are now in place to quicken the adoption of HTTPS and secure contexts, and follow through on our intent to deprecate non-secure HTTP.Įveryone involved in standards development is strongly encouraged to advocate requiring secure contexts for all new features on behalf of Mozilla. Mozilla’s embrace of HTTPS, the secure form of HTTP, has ratcheted up a notch with the news that Firefox developers must start using a web security design called ‘secure contexts’ “effective immediately.”