Chrome will block downloads from HTTP sites. Both Chrome and Safari report the wording “not secure” when the user navigates to an HTTP site without a valid certificate, or that uses an insecure version of TLS (1.1 or earlier); Google is considering going further and now that HTTPS has become standard, the idea is to block downloads from insecure HTTP sites.
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Chrome offers the option (deactivated by default) in the Preferences “Always use secure connections” (Settings > Privacy and Security). Connections to sites that use HTTPS are more secure than those to sites that don’t use HTTPS; by activating this option, Chrome tries to load all sites via HTTPS and displays a warning before the user visits a site that does not support this protocol.
In the future (with Chrome 111) Google intends to go further, blocking downloads from HTTP sites, an option that should guarantee greater security, useful for preventing the downloading of files from sites that are by their nature unsafe. The novelty was announced on the Chromium Gerrit website. Chrome currently reports a security issue when trying to download a file via HTTP, showing a warning to the left of the address bar; in the future this function will be integrated in the option “Always use a secure connection”.
As mentioned, the function will arrive with Chrome 111, a version that we will probably see in spring 2023 (at the time of writing, the most updated version of Chrome is 108).
