It has probably been a while since you typed “https” in front of a URL to cruise around the web, but those simple letters are still crucial to your experience on the internet.
That familiar abbreviation stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and it’s the system that helps bring all that sweet content from the web down in front of your eyeballs. It’s the protocol that enables us to interact with the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, it can also provide an opportunity for bad people to inject all kinds of shenanigans into the browsing process, from secretly sending bad software to your machine to tricking you into looking at a site that’s not what it claims, like imitating your bank’s website, for example, and getting you to enter your username and password.
So why do you see the “S” at the end of it sometimes? HTTPS is a secure version of the HTTP protocol. It has become the standard on the web, and now companies like Google are giving it a push for total internet saturation. Late last week, Google announced that its Chrome browser will label any site using HTTP as “not secure” in an effort to push consumers and site creators toward a safer internet experience.
