Article by George Norman

On 05 Aug 2011

We are glad to report that HTTPS Everywhere, the Firefox add-on developed by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and the Tor Project, has graduated out of Beta (it was in Beta since June 2010). Until now you may have stayed away from the add-on because it carried the Beta tag and as we all know, Beta releases can be buggy, may crash, may not work properly, may give you a headache. So if you did not want to put up with the issues commonly associated with Beta releases, you stayed away from this add-on.

You don’t need to say away anymore and that’s because, as mentioned above, the add-on has graduated out of Beta. The EFF, a donor-funded nonprofit organization that defends free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights, announced yesterday, the 4th of August, that version 1.0 of HTTPS Everywhere has been released to the public. If you would like to get the add-on, you can get it by clicking here .


Before you go get the add-on, perhaps you would like to know what it does. It’s name is a pretty big giveaway, but I’m going to say it anyway: the add-on forces an encrypted (HTTPS) connection with numerous sites. The Beta version provided support for a handful of sites; the 1.0 version provides support for more than 1,000 websites, including Google Search, Google Image Search, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Wikipedia, Flickr, Netflix, and Apple.

"HTTPS secures web browsing by encrypting both requests from your browser to websites and the resulting pages that are displayed," said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "Without HTTPS, your online reading habits and activities are vulnerable to eavesdropping, and your accounts are vulnerable to hijacking. Today's Paxfire revelations are a grand example of how things can go wrong. EFF created HTTPS Everywhere to make it easier for people to keep their user names, passwords, and browsing histories secure and private. With the revelation that companies like Paxfire are out there, intercepting millions of people's searches without their permission, this kind of protection is indispensable."

Please note that HTTPS Everywhere forces a HTTPS connection on sites that support HTTPS; it can’t do anything for sites that are HTTP-only.

Additional information on the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on is available here.



Tags: EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Firefox, Add-on, Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere

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