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There's nothing lost from keeping the green lock and adding the red "not secure" warning in place of having no warning at all. There's no reason to maintain a

There's nothing lost from keeping the green lock and adding the red "not secure" warning in place of having no warning at all. There's no reason to maintain a "no-indicator" state, UX or otherwise. Keep the green lock for sites which implement it correctly. peterwwillis makes a good point in another top level comment -- and my own research in securing products suggests much of the same, specifically that many users don't assume things are secure. I'd extend that argument by stating most users don't assume things are insecure either unless the security of the system is specifically called out. In other words, it's generally out-of-mind. Considering this, you should be keeping green locks and red warnings going forward and never having a no-warning state except perhaps on private networks where the security of the connection is to be determined by the team which owns that private network. There's an entire industry of "Secured By" badges which CAs managed to market to draw attention to connection security in a space where standard indicators should be serving that role based on standard--not marketing--metrics. (This will probably prepend a later letter I'll write up about Google Security's unilateral changes the past few years. This and HPKP are two that come to mind.) Edit: A good point was raised by twitter user @akanygren on this topic, notably that since there's no assurance other vendors will share this same approach, this will immediately sow UX confusion. The corollary I'd attach to that is that with Chrome as a plurality player eliminating a decision-point in their UI, other browsers now gain a marketable competitive advantage by labeling secure connections as such and are dis-incentivized to follow suit because they stand to benefit by maintaining some variant of the status quo. https://twitter.com/akanygren/status/997178362669010944 https://twitter.com/akanygren/status/997178362669010944 https://twitter.com/eganist/status/997186215249137665 https://twitter.com/eganist/status/997186215249137665

ovao 8y ago
There is actually appeal to having no indicator: the absense of an indicator doesn’t inadvertently suggest anything about the site’s overall security. The padlock icon we’re so accustomed to can create a false sense of security, as every other aspect except the connection to all servers may actually be insecure. You may, for instance, be transmitting credentials that may be stored in plain text, be easily accessible to third-parties or may even be handed directly to black markets. The padlock itself says nothing about any of those details. A better approach to no icon at all, I think, is simply “secure connection” wording. Trying to distill a lot of complexity and nuance into a single icon is what’s ultimately problematic. It works somewhat well, but not quite well enough.
- RussianCow 8y ago
  > A better approach to no icon at all, I think, is simply “secure connection” wording. The problem is, most people won't understand the difference between that and just "secure"; arguably, the people who understand what "secure connection" means are those for whom this change doesn't matter.
  - ovao 8y ago
    It's a fair point. I can't think of any perfect solution, only solutions that are less worse than others at conveying the 'Right Thing'.

ovao 8y ago

There is actually appeal to having no indicator: the absense of an indicator doesn’t inadvertently suggest anything about the site’s overall security. The padlock icon we’re so accustomed to can create a false sense of security, as every other aspect except the connection to all servers may actually be insecure. You may, for instance, be transmitting credentials that may be stored in plain text, be easily accessible to third-parties or may even be handed directly to black markets. The padlock itself says nothing about any of those details. A better approach to no icon at all, I think, is simply “secure connection” wording. Trying to distill a lot of complexity and nuance into a single icon is what’s ultimately problematic. It works somewhat well, but not quite well enough.

RussianCow 8y ago
> A better approach to no icon at all, I think, is simply “secure connection” wording. The problem is, most people won't understand the difference between that and just "secure"; arguably, the people who understand what "secure connection" means are those for whom this change doesn't matter.
- ovao 8y ago
  It's a fair point. I can't think of any perfect solution, only solutions that are less worse than others at conveying the 'Right Thing'.