Later this year, Google will replace the lock icon that shows you’re visiting a website in Chrome with secure HTTPS encryption.

Google will replace the lock icon in the browser. Google introduced blocking back in the 1990s when HTTPS was new. With that symbol in the URL, you knew the website you were visiting had a secure connection. But almost thirty years later, most websites in Chrome are running on this protocol anyway and the blocking is essentially redundant.

safety above all

Two years ago, Google conducted an extensive study and, according to the tech giant, it found that barely 11 percent of respondents actually knew what the lock symbol in a URL actually meant. It can therefore cause confusion; The connection may be secure, but malicious people often work with HTTPS encryption. For example, phishing sites might as well have a ban. Google now wants to counteract this false sense of security.

The new icon will be a variant of what you regularly see in settings menus. This makes it more inviting to click and view the information of the website you are visiting. Surfers don’t do this enough because, according to Google, they don’t even realize that this is possible.

what and when

Aside from a new look, the icon doesn’t get any new features. Google will also continue to indicate when you visit a page with a less secure HTTP encryption. And when you click on a secure site information, you still see a lock on the menu to indicate it’s a secure connection.

The new icon will be introduced with Chrome 117. For desktop and Android, that means “sometime in September” of this year. On iOS, the lock icon disappears completely because, according to Google, you couldn’t click on it to get more information anyway.

Those who have Chrome Canary, a more unstable version of the browser used primarily for testing, can already see what the icon will look like by enabling Chrome Refresh 2023. However, Google states that it is still under development and therefore the end result may still differ from what is visible now.