I recently read an article that, among other things, apparently seriously urging browser vendors to deprecate and disable plain text HTTP connections by the end of October of this year (via, and I'm deliberately not linking directly to the article). While I am a strong fan of HTTPS in general, I have some feelings about a rapid deprecation of HTTP. One of my views is that plain text HTTP is part of the web's long tail.

As I'm using the term here, the web's long tail (also is the huge mass of less popular things that are individually less frequently visited but which in aggregate amount to a substantial part of the web. The web's popular, busy sites are frequently updated and can handle transitions without problems. They can readily switch to using modern HTML, modern CSS, modern JavaScript, and so on (although they don't necessarily do so), and along with that update all of their content to HTTPS. In fact they mostly or entirely have done so over the last ten to fifteen years. The web's long tail doesn't work like that. Parts of it use old JavaScript, old CSS, old HTML, and these days, plain HTTP (in addition to the people who have objections to HTTPS and deliberately stick to HTTP).

The aggregate size and value of the long tail is part of why browsers have maintained painstaking compatibility back to old HTML so far, including things like HTML Image Maps. There's plenty of parts of the long tail that will never be updated to have HTTPS or work properly with it. For browsers to discard HTTP anyway would be to discard that part of the long tail, which would be a striking break with browser tradition. I don't think this is very likely and I certainly hope that it never comes to pass, because that long tail is part of what gives the web its value.

(It would be an especially striking break since a visible percentage of page loads still happen with HTTP instead of HTTPS. For example, Google's stats say that globally 5% of Windows Chrome page loads apparently still use HTTP. That's roughly one in twenty page loads, and the absolute number is going to be very large given how many page loads happen with Chrome on Windows. This large number is one reason I don't think this is at all a serious proposal; as usual with this sort of thing, it ignores that social problems are the ones that matter.)

PS: Of course, not all of the HTTP connections are part of the web's long tail as such. Some of them are to, for example, manage local devices via little built in web servers that simply don't have HTTPS. The people with these devices aren't in any rush to replace them just because some people don't like HTTP, and the vendors who made them aren't going to update their software to support (modern) HTTPS even for the devices which support firmware updates and where the vendor is still in business.

(You can view them as part of the long tail of 'the web' as a broad idea and interface, even though they're not exposed to the world the way that the (public) web is.)