Chrome to warn you against using insecure websites

Online shopping is fun and convenient but it also leaves you vulnerable to online hacking if you are using insecure web pages. To guard you against such scenarios, Chrome has started notifying users if and when they use websites that don’t use HTTPS, flagging them as "not secure" in red type.

As per Chrome’s latest update, next time, if you're on an insecure shopping site that asks for a password or credit card info, it will give you a caution sign in the address field. Until now, Chrome only used a green “Secure” label to indicate when a website is using HTTPS and a neutral icon when a website is not using HTTPS.

The move comes on the heels of Mozilla releasing Firefox 51 earlier this week that comes with similar protection. With the new release comes an insecure warning on any page that offers a login form over an HTTP connection instead of HTTPS.

HTTP uses an open, unencrypted connection between you and the website you’re visiting that could be intercepted by anyone monitoring traffic between you and the site. Both browser makers plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure in the future, with the long-term goal of getting the whole web onto HTTPS.

Meanwhile, the latest Chrome 56 has boosted the page reload speeds by as much as 28 percent on mobile for one specific site. Chrome on mobile now "has a simplified reload behaviour to only validate the main resource and continue with a regular page load. This new behaviour maximises the reuse of cached resources and results in lower latency, power consumption and data usage."

Chrome 56 also adds support for the Web Bluetooth API on Android, Chrome OS, and Mac. This lets sites connect to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices such as printers and LED displays with just a few lines of JavaScript.