Google shows the web is a lot more secure than it was a year ago

As we spend more time online, the need for secure browsing and communications has become more and more important. Messaging apps now incorporate encryption as standard and many of your favorite websites (including this one) are moving to HTTPS to protect their visitors. For the longest time, Google has helped champion that movement by rolling out secure apps and services, but its latest move is all about highlighting the good work of others. The web is a lot more secure than it was just a year and a half ago, and thanks to its new Transparency Report metric, Google has the stats to prove it.

In its Transparency Report on HTTPS Usage, Google's charts show a healthy rise in pages being loaded over HTTPS between April 2015 and October 2016. In Spring of last year, secure sites visited by Chrome users on Windows, Mac and Linux machines hovered around the 40 percent mark. Fast forward to today and users on the same platforms now spend around two-thirds of their time on secure HTTPs pages.

As you can see from the graph below, sites aren't spending as much time securing their pages for mobile visitors (or maybe mobile visitors are going to different sites) but that isn't to say that things haven't improved over the last 18 months.

Google has collected browsing data from Chrome users who have opted in to share usage statistics. According to StatCounter and NetMarketShare, Chrome is the world's most popular browser by a clear margin, allowing Google to provide more accurate and detailed breakdowns of how secure the web really is.