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Every once in a while, someone comes to Meta to report a bug about something not working and it turns out that person is visiting one of the network sites over HTTPS/SSL. The problem has been growing since browsers started to outright block mixed content instead of showing a warning.

The usual answer is that HTTPS is not yet fully supported, and the person should try again using HTTP. Sometimes things get fixed, improving the situation a bit.

Is there a roadmap for full support? Partial support has been there for more than two years now.

Is this actively being worked on? If not, what are the reasons to partially support it instead of disabling it completely to avoid these problems?

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Yes, SSL support is actively being worked on, and will be completed once they can figure out how to account for all of the pitfalls associated with the transition. My (admittedly uninformed) understanding is that there's no hard timeline in place, just because it's difficult to gauge what it will take to tackle some of the issues.

You can view Nick's original blog post about the subject, and he's reportedly working on a new one where he'll detail what they've been working on to make sure that HTTPS connection times fall in line with standard HTTP ones. From the looks of things, this will include an interactive map that summarizes the various data points they collected during testing.

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  • Interesting links, thanks!
    – Stijn
    Mar 19, 2014 at 16:32
  • Is SEDE considered to be part of this? In other words, does SEDE needs updates to support HTTPS/SSL?
    – rene
    Aug 3, 2014 at 11:26
  • @rene I think I already made most of the updates - some resource urls in the database might need to be updated, but otherwise I think it's okay. I'll check to be sure though.
    – Tim Stone
    Aug 3, 2014 at 13:15
  • Ok, I asked because of this bug
    – rene
    Aug 3, 2014 at 13:18
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    A related bug.
    – Deer Hunter
    Jan 31, 2016 at 10:58
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The switch to HTTPS is about to happen, as detailed in the HTTPS: It's time post on MSO.

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    Only on SO for now apparently
    – Cai
    Mar 6, 2017 at 15:37
  • @Cai Yeah, but from what I understand MSE should closely follow, and after that all other sites will be moved. Anyway, just posted an answer here to "resolve" the question and not leave any open ends.
    – Stijn
    Mar 6, 2017 at 15:47
  • Sure, just wasn't obvious (from the MSO post) that this wasn't being rolled out network wide right now.
    – Cai
    Mar 6, 2017 at 16:00
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    See also (the coincidentally named) Roadmap to HTTPS: serving and uploading HTTPS-images only here on Meta SE.
    – Pops
    Mar 6, 2017 at 16:45

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