Disable HTTPS upgrade? [LWN.net]

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 6, 2025 8:40 UTC (Thu) by PeeWee (subscriber, #175777)
In reply to: Disable HTTPS upgrade? by Wol
Parent article: Firefox 136.0 released

This has nothing to do with planned obsolescence and it's quite ironic to point towards printers, which are the epitome (search for "printer") of that very practice. HTTP won't go anywhere since it is part of HTTPS, which simply uses TLS underneath, whereas HTTP relies on plain TCP directly.

to post comments

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 6, 2025 13:06 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (9 responses)

Old webservers use old versions of TLS that are rejected by newer browsers for security reasons,
thus they are not reachable by https anymore.

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 6, 2025 23:38 UTC (Thu) by PeeWee (subscriber, #175777) [Link] (8 responses)

Good riddance, I say to that. Who runs such ancient setups anyway? If they cannot be bothered to upgrade their servers, they cannot be trusted wholesale and thus TLS should rightly fail.

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 7, 2025 19:47 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (7 responses)

Plenty of older networking gear, for example. I have a UPS from 2008 that has a management interface with an obsolete TLS. Still perfectly usable and secure (if the management interface is on a separate VLAN).

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 7, 2025 21:46 UTC (Fri) by PeeWee (subscriber, #175777) [Link] (6 responses)

if the management interface is on a separate VLAN

Which basically means TLS is pointless anyway. Try harder next time or just stop making up excuses for you unfounded ranting.

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 7, 2025 21:48 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

Your statement was:

> Who runs such ancient setups anyway?

I'm replying to it. There is plenty of old gear that has obsolete TLS, and has to use plain HTTP.

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 7, 2025 22:06 UTC (Fri) by PeeWee (subscriber, #175777) [Link] (4 responses)

And how does FF stop anyone from doing that? Enter a complete URI with explicit http: scheme and everything is just fine. Also the previous example was about ancient TLS, or rather SSL as it was called back then. Anything running SSL is obsolete by definition and one can just as well use plaintext HTTP, which may be the saner choice since it does not even pretend and thus won't provide a false sense of security.

And now the weather: over at LWN there was a ~~strom~~ light breeze in a tea cup, caused by users of deprecated software blowing off steam while fighting over a giant ~~nix~~nothingburger. And with that I wish you all a good night and an even better early spring weekend. ;)

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 8, 2025 0:29 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

> And how does FF stop anyone from doing that?

By forcing HTTPS and sticking to it, even if you specify "http".

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 8, 2025 1:02 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

>> And how does FF stop anyone from doing that?
>By forcing HTTPS and sticking to it, even if you specify "http".

And then helpfully "remembering" your "choice".

I fight with FF over this crap on average a couple of times a week.

Disable HTTPS upgrade?

Posted Mar 8, 2025 6:51 UTC (Sat) by PeeWee (subscriber, #175777) [Link] (1 responses)

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

Again: You open the history sidebar (Ctrl-H), or the history manager (Ctrl-Shift-H), find and select the offending site, right-click it and select Forget About This Site..., and afterwards you open it only once by explicitly specifying the http: scheme, FF will remember your choice and subsequently you can open it without it.

If you guys would spend half as much time on actually trying to solve problems as you do on this pointless ranting, you may just end up with lower blood pressure and live longer and, most importantly, happier. It took me all of one minute to figure this out, once I understood what was happening. OK one and a half, two, tops; and only because I created a fresh profile to test the procedure - you are welcome BTW. And I have posted this further up already. If that does not fix the issue, report a bug, instead of polluting public forums with your foulmouthed ranting, which only serves to frustrate you and others while leaving Mozilla totally oblivious to the fact there might, just might, be an issue. It's a new feature after all, and I bet, you guys are the loud minority complaining about it while the vast majority welcomes it, me included.

Or switch to a different browser if you hate FF that much. Or just do you, I don't care. But be prepared to be ridiculed, if you keep this up. With this all being said, ever so redundantly, we come to the weather report: still unchanged.

Stop here

Posted Mar 8, 2025 14:19 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

OK, please, let's just bring an end to this thread, and to this style of discussion. We can do better.