Firefox 83 has been released to the stable channel with a new feature meant to improve the security of its users, namely HTTPS-Only Mode.
The new feature is designed to prevent eavesdropping, especially when it comes to websites containing sensitive information, such as emails, financial data, or medical details.
With HTTPS-Only Mode enabled, Firefox attempts to establish a fully secure connection for each and every site the user accesses, and also asks for the user’s permission before connecting to a site that lacks support for secure connections.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over TLS (HTTPS) was meant to address the security shortcomings of HTTP through encrypting the connection between the browser and the visited website.
While most websites do include support for HTTPS, and those that don’t are fewer by the day, many sites do fall back to the unsecure HTTP protocol.
On top of that, Mozilla notes, millions of legacy HTTP links pointing to insecure versions of websites still exist, meaning that, when the user clicks on them, the browser traditionally connects using the insecure HTTP protocol.
“In light of the very high availability of HTTPS, we believe that it is time to let our users choose to always use HTTPS. That’s why we have created HTTPS-Only Mode, which ensures that Firefox doesn’t make any insecure connections without your permission,” Mozilla says.
Once HTTPS-Only Mode has been enabled, Firefox will attempt to always establish a fully secure connection to the visited website, and even if the user clicks on an HTTP link or manually enters it, the browser will still use HTTPS instead.
The new feature can be enabled from the “Preferences” menu, in the “Privacy & Security” section. There, after scrolling down to “H ..
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