Later this year, Google will replace the padlock icon that indicates you’re visiting a site in Chrome with secure HTTPS encryption.
Google will replace the lock icon in the browser. Google introduced the lock back in the 90’s, when HTTPS was new. With this symbol in the URL, you knew that the site you visited had a secure connection. But after nearly thirty years, the majority of websites in Chrome work with this protocol anyway, and locking is basically unnecessary.
Safety above all
Two years ago, Google conducted an extensive study, and according to the tech giant, it turned out that only 11 percent of respondents actually knew what the padlock symbol in a URL meant. So it can cause confusion. The connection may be secure, but malicious individuals often operate using HTTPS encryption. Phishing websites, for example, can also have a lock. Google now wants to address this false sense of security.
The new icon will be different than what you see regularly in Settings menus. This makes it more attractive to click on and displays the information of the site you are visiting. Surfers don’t do it enough because they don’t even realize this is a possibility, according to Google.
What and when
Apart from the new look, the icon doesn’t get any new functionality. Google will also still indicate when you visited a site with less secure HTTP encryption. And when you click on secure location information, you’ll still see a padlock in the list to indicate that it’s a secure connection.
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The new icon will be introduced with Chrome 117. For desktop and Android, that means “sometime in September” this year. On iOS, the lock icon disappears entirely, because according to Google, you can’t tap it to get more information anyway.
Those with Chrome Canary, an unstable version of the browser used primarily for testing, can already see what the code will look like by enabling Chrome Refresh 2023. However, Google notes that it is still in development and that the end result may still vary. of what is visible now.
