Ross McKillop

Help Keep Your Browsing Secure in Firefox

By / December 3, 2021

This tutorial will show you how to enable a setting in Firefox that will enable secure browsing across all of the sites you visit – and when https isn’t available, it’ll warn you first.

Not that long ago, https was much less common than it is now. Mozilla teamed up with the EFF to create an add-on to help boost the usage of https, and it was tremendously popular. Fast forward to 2021 and now Firefox has that functionality built in – it’s just not turned on by default (yet). So – here’s how make sure you’re using the https version of a site, and if one isn’t available, get a warning and confirm you’d like to continue.

  1. Start by clicking the Menu button (the one that looks like 3 horizontal lines on top of each other, located in the top right-corner of Firefox) and select Settings from the list of options.

    2. the main Firefox menu with an arrow pointing at the Settings option

  2. Select Privacy & Security from the column on the left side of the Settings window.

    3. the Firefox Settings categories with an arrow pointing to Privacy and Security

  3. Scroll all the way down to the HTTPS-Only Mode section. Select the option titled Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all windows and then close the Settings window. That’s it! Now when you visit a page taht defaults to http (not secure), Firefox will check to see if there’s an https (secure) version of that page, and load it for you instead of the http version.

    4. enable secure browsing in Firefox

  4. If there is no secure (https) version of the page, and the only way to visit that page is via the less secure http, Firefox will display an alert asking if you’re sure you want to continue. If it’s a site that you were planning on sharing important information with (a username or password, email address, personal info etc) – strongly reconsider doing so. If you do decide to continue, click the Continue to HTTP Site button.

    5. the non secure web page alert for browsing in Firefox

  5. If you want to create a “rule” so that a specific http page always loads, without warning you, click the lock icon in the address bar (see screenshot below) and switch the HTTPS-Only Mode pull-down menu option to Off. Now when you visit that page in the future, Firefox won’t warning you that you’re visiting a non-secure page – although it will continue to warn you about other non-secure pages.

    6. the Firefox address bar with the lock icon options displayed

  6. That’s it! Since you’re all done now, whey not check out some of other other Firefox guides? :)