Google and HTTP
I’m a big fan of moving over to HTTPS in favour of staying on HTTP. This mainly comes down to two reasons:
- I want to run on http2 and it requires https; and
- I want to use Service Workers and have an offline progressive web ap… which also requires HTTPS.
I’d never thought of the things that this article points out. Taking a look through all the archives and historic pages on the web who are not is a position to do anything about moving from HTTP to HTTPS. It could be that the owners of those older websites can’t afford to, although it is free now with Lets Encrypt.
More likely the situation is that the owers of the site just don’t have the technical know-how on implementing HTTPS on their site and enabling redirets. The other situation is that there just isn’t anyone managing those sites any more.
It’s an interesting take on things.
A lot of the web consists of archives. Files put in places that no one maintains. They just work. There’s no one there to do the work that Google wants all sites to do. And some people have large numbers of domains and sub-domains hosted on all kinds of software Google never thought about. Places where the work required to convert wouldn’t be justified by the possible benefit. The reason there’s so much diversity is that the web is an open thing, it was never owned.
An excerpt from Google and HTTP
