Google makes life easier for mixed-content sysadmins Rejoice, sys admins with big non-encrypted image databases: Google feels your pain and says the next version of Chromium, 43, will provide some relief. One of the challenges, the Chocolate Factory reckons, is that old sites with lots of non-HTTPS resources can't be migrated with a simple flick of the switch. In current …
"[...] something that requires users to decide whether to keep browsing or close the window."
On IE, at least up to IE8, the prompt asks if you want to display the insecure items. You can continue reading with only the secure parts of the page. There is also a tick box to accept any insecure items in future.
Sounds wonderful - but only if (as a minimum) Firefox, Safari, IE & Spartan follow suit in recognising and enforcing the same meta command. Otherwise it may create more problems than it solves (especially for operators of forums where posters reference their own images).
Umm, why are these sites not using '//example.com/path/to/image.jpg' to reference their images? By doing this, the URL scheme for the images will match the scheme for the page, be it HTTP or HTTPS.
This is surely better than what seems like a bodge and since most content is database driven, a simple UPDATE query can adapt links to remove the http: part of the image URL.
Since that requires each site updating, I can see why Google have done this, but if these sites had been linked properly to start with, they wouldn't be in this situation now.
See section 4.2 of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt
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