![]() We’ve dedicated a whole blog post to showcasing just a small proportion of the new functionality being made available thanks to WebAssembly. All of this, of course, rests on the incredible foundation that is the full web platform-full of powerful capabilities, rendering methods, and much more. With WebAssembly offering portability plus performant access to the CPU the web now has the necessary low level building blocks for a huge variety of new functionality to be built. WebAssembly also offers advanced computation primitives like parallelizable threads and Single Instruction Multiple Data ( SIMD ) that enable it to maximize the performance from the CPU. By leveraging WebAssembly, developers can take libraries and functionality from other platforms and performantly bring them to the web, without requiring any reimplementation. WebAssembly is a portable bytecode format compiled from other languages to offer maximized performance. After years of investing in lower level capabilities that act as building blocks for higher level functionality, we are seeing a new dawn of expanded functionality at a dramatically expanded pace. Decades of major investment has pushed the browser functionality to astonishing heights, but this process can take time and the web doesn’t need to have every capability built in. In order to maintain browser interoperability, new web capabilities need to go through a rigorous standardization process and cross browser implementations. WebAssembly is fundamentally changing how new developer capabilities and functionality can be created on the web. You can see the new tune icon now in Chrome Canary if you enable Chrome Refresh 2023 at chrome://flags#chrome-refresh-2023, but keep in mind this flag enables work that is still actively in-progress and under development, and does not represent a final product. Chrome will continue to alert users when their connection is not secure. The new icon is scheduled to launch in Chrome 117, which releases in early September 2023, as part of a general design refresh for desktop platforms. We think the new icon helps make permission controls and additional security information more accessible, while avoiding the misunderstandings that plague the lock icon. Our research has also shown that many users never understood that clicking the lock icon showed important information and controls. Replacing the lock icon with a neutral indicator prevents the misunderstanding that the lock icon is associated with the trustworthiness of a page, and emphasizes that security should be the default state in Chrome. We plan to replace the lock icon with a variant of the tune icon, which is commonly used to indicate controls and settings. Misunderstandings are so pervasive that many organizations, including the FBI, publish explicit guidance that the lock icon is not an indicator of website safety. This misunderstanding is not harmless - nearly all phishing sites use HTTPS, and therefore also display the lock icon. Despite our best efforts, our research in 2021 showed that only 11% of study participants correctly understood the precise meaning of the lock icon. We redesigned the lock icon in 2016 after our research showed that many users misunderstood what the icon conveyed. Today, this is no longer true, and HTTPS is the norm, not the exception, and we've been evolving Chrome accordingly.įor example: we know that the lock icon does not indicate website trustworthiness. When HTTPS was rare, the lock icon drew attention to the additional protections provided by HTTPS. HTTPS was originally so rare that at one point, Internet Explorer popped up an alert to users to notify them that the connection was secured by HTTPS, reminiscent of the “Everything’s Okay” alarm from The Simpsons. The lock icon is meant to indicate that the network connection is a secure channel between the browser and site and that the network connection cannot be tampered with or eavesdropped on by third parties, but it’s a remnant of an era where HTTPS was uncommon. This is great news for the ecosystem it also creates an opportunity to re-evaluate how we signal security protections in the browser. Today, however, HTTPS has become the norm and over 95% of page loads in Chrome on Windows are over a secure channel using HTTPS. As late as 2013, only 14% of the Alexa Top 1M sites supported HTTPS. For the last decade, Chrome participated in a major initiative to increase HTTPS adoption on the web, and to help make the web secure by default. Read on to learn about this multi-year journey.īrowsers have shown a lock icon when a site loads over HTTPS since the early versions of Netscape in the 1990s. Editor’s note: based on industry research (from Chrome and others), and the ubiquity of HTTPS, we will be replacing the lock icon in Chrome’s address bar with a new “tune” icon – both to emphasize that security should be the default state, and to make site settings more accessible.
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