HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension goes 1.0

The Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere, designed to automatically navigate users to HTTPS-secured versions of sites by rewriting requests, has reached version 1.0. The project was started in June 2010 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Tor Project collaborating on creating the extension which has been refined and tuned over the past year with an improved UI and better performance.

The goal of HTTPS Everywhere is to ensure that users send as little unencrypted information across the internet as possible, tying in with the EFF's "HTTPS Now" campaign. Although many sites are adding "HTTPS only" options, HTTPS Everywhere steps in where a user may have forgotten to activate the option or is following a non-HTTPS URL which has been given to them. An FAQ page gives more information on the capabilities, limitations and workarounds for some issues with HTTPS Everywhere.

Version 1.0 can enable HTTPS usage on over one thousand sites out of the box including Google searches, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress.com blogs, PayPal, and the EFF and Tor web sites. HTTPS Everywhere is not limited to those sites though; users can write their own rules for particular sites and contribute them to the project. HTTPS Everywhere is licensed under the GPLv2 and source code is available from the project's development page.

(djwm)