Force a browser to load the 'https' edition of a website, not the 'http'?

Question

This is similar to this previous question, but I believe it's a bit different^*.

Sites like GMail support a preference that pushes all traffic through the SSL edition of the site rather than the plain-text protocol.

For sites that don't offer such preferences (or ones that may, but I have been unable to find, like facebook), is there a way using only the browser (perhaps with a plugin or addon) to always try SSL first, and fall-back to plain-text iff SSL fails?

Is that solution available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux? Just one?

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^{_{* The previous question was looking for external applications that would accomplish this goal.}}

Solution 1

Even if you could find such a solution, you'd have the problem that some web servers will always answer https requests, but won't send you to the website's page. Most likely your browser will end up on some landing page of the web server. An application would not be able to distinguish a landing page from the page you actually want. I'd check the similar question for external programs... I'm not sure if you can accomplish this without an external program.

Solution 2

Yes, this can be done. The EFF has published a Firefox plugin named HTTPS Everywhere which contains a list of sites known to support https connections and will force the use of https when visiting those sites.

Solution 3

If you're using Firefox, check out the HTTPS Everywhere extension from the EFF.

Solution 4

There are add-ons to provide what you're asking. If you use Chrome, just add --force-https to the shortcut, command section or install "Use HTTPS". If you use Firefox then using Noscript will allow you to do that but there might be another add-on that only forces https:// in case you don't want all of the functions of Noscript.

Just do lots of Google searches and you'll find options but be sure that they trusted applications if you go with an add-on.

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Comments

[quack quixote]

since your question is OS-agnostic i think the [https] and [ssl] tags are more useful than 3 operating system tags.

[David Yates]

@quack quixote - makes sense.. hadn't thought of that when I asked :)

[David Yates]

:-\ .. didn't think about that as a possibility. I guess, then, too, if one server is hosting multiple domains, it could send me to the 'one' that's using SSL, and not the one I'm after. Bleh! Thanks for the thoughts :)

[Pylsa]

You're very welcome! =)

[Colin Pickard]

eff.org/https-everywhere is the best of these

[David Yates]

looks like @arathorn just beat you to the punch on this one :)

[Fax]

This may have been a good answer in 2010, but I don't think it is today.