The latest version of Google Chrome, version 68, has finally started to display webpages delivered over the plain HTTP protocol as “not secure”. If you click on the “non secure” label in the address bar, it further displays more details about the warning and how the connection is not secure, how your information entered on this HTTP webpage can be stolen by attackers and that you should not enter any sensitive information on that website.
Google had promised this two years ago and gave enough time for the website owners to install SSL certificates on their websites which makes the webpages secure as they are delivered over the secure HTTPS protocol. And the website owners do not even have to spend too much money to buy those expensive SSL certificates as there are free SSL options from Cloudflare or LetsEncrypt.
If you want to change the way the warning is shown in Google Chrome, then you can follow these steps:
- Launch Chrome web browser and enter chrome://flags in the address bar.
- In the search box, type non-secure to find the setting Mark non-secure origins as non-secure.
- Click on the small drop-down listbox to see all the options available – Default, Enabled, Enables (mark as actively dangerous), Enabled (mark with a non-secure warning), Enabled (mark with a non-secure warning and dangerous on form edits), Enabled (mark with a non-secure warning and dangerous on passwords and credit card fields) and Disabled.
- After you pick one of these options, you can click on Relaunch button to restart Chrome with new settings.
If you want to switch back to the default settings once again, then you have to repeat all the steps mentioned above with a little change – choose the “Default” option in the step 3 above. The default settings work great for everyday Chrome browser usage.