HTTP has been used to send and receive web page content for several years, but recently, the transition to HTTPS, a more secure communication protocol, is underway. In Chrome 90, which is expected to be released in April 2021, by default, when accessing a website from the address bar, you simply connect to https://.
When accessing a website, you can enter a search term to select from candidate websites that appear on the search results screen, and you can enter a URL in the address bar to access a specific website. However, if you enter the URL in the address bar, it is rarely entered as https:// or http://. For example, to access the site’https://example.com’, many users try to access it by typing’example.com’.
When a web browser enters a URL without https:// or http://, it automatically tries to access the URL by entering https:// or http:// first. In Chrome, the default behavior so far has been to first select http:// and try to access it, and if it fails, it redirects to https://.
If a redirection occurs to https://, Chrome remembers this action, and the next time you enter the same URL, it accesses https://. In an era when many websites didn’t support HTTPS, this is a more practical method.
However, in recent years, most of the major platforms have adopted HTTPS, and most of the websites that Chrome connects to are already responding to HTTPS. Accordingly, the Chrome development team announced that Chrome 90, which will be released in April 2021, will switch to a method that attempts to access https:// instead of trying to access http:// by default.
Basically, even if you try to access https:// and do not redirect from https:// to http://, the initial loading speed for a website that supports HTTPS is faster. If it fails to access https://, it is explained that redirection is performed by replacing it with http://. This change will be applied to the desktop version of Chrome 90 and Android first, and the iOS version will also be supported. Related information can be found here.