Https Everywhere transitions to DuckDuckGo rules and is being phased out
Browser extension Https Everywhere switches to new rules of DuckDuckGo’s Smarter Encryption and will be phased out in due course. This has been announced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The foundation no longer manually adds https domains to the extension.
Https Everywhere, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s browser extension that automatically switches website connections to encrypted https connections whenever possible, is adopting the DuckDuckGo ruleset, eliminating the need for the EFF to manually add rules to the extension as it does today. does happen. This makes it easier to provide more websites with a secure connection.
DuckDuckGo’s Smarter Encryption basically does the same thing as Https Everywhere. It forces an encrypted connection whenever possible when visiting a website to protect user data. In this way, it claims that 81 percent of the clicks from the DuckDuckGo search results can go through an encrypted connection.
To make that possible, Smarter Encryption uses a long list of websites that it knows have an encrypted https version of and automatically redirects users to that encrypted connection even if someone puts http in front of a URL. Unlike Https Everywhere, DuckDuckGo automatically generates this list when crawling over the Internet.
End of Life for Https Everywhere
Because Smarter Encryption compiles that automated list, it saves a lot of work for the foundation behind Https Everywhere if the extension uses the DuckDuckGo ruleset. This is in line with plans to phase out the extension in due course. No concrete date has been given yet, but the EFF indicates that the extension will be retired when it is no longer needed.
According to the foundation, more and more websites use exclusively https, so that the extension is less and less necessary. In addition, Smarter Encryption has a larger list of domains and different browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome, increasingly force https themselves. In any case, the extension will remain active this year using its own ruleset, but from the end of next month the EFF will no longer honor requests to add new domains.