Firefox Users Chalk up HTTPS Encryption Milestone

A majority of Mozilla users were served encrypted pageloads for the first time yesterday, meaning their web browsing data was secured from snoopers and hackers while in transit. The HTTPS milestone was tweeted by Josh Aas, head of the Let’s Encrypt initiative which has been working to help smaller websites switch to encrypting their web traffic.

Mozilla, which is one of the organizations backing Let’s Encrypt, was reporting that 40 per cent of page views were encrypted as of December 2015. So it’s an impressively speedy rise.

That said, there are plenty of caveats here — the biggest being it’s just one browser, Mozilla’s Firefox, which lags far behind the dominant default browsers of the mainstream web.

Statista pegs Firefox at just a 7.77 per cent global marketshare for July 2016 vs 49.5 per cent for Google’s Chrome and 13.68 per cent for Apple’s Safari browser.