DuckDuckGo's rulesets are supported in the latest version already. The main takeaway is that its rulesets will be retired in late 2021 to give partners and downstream channels enough adjusting time. The EFF published a plan to phase out HTTPS Everywhere rulesets. Since it covers more sites, it will upgrade more connections to HTTPS when used. Smarter Encryption uses an automated approach for building its rulesets, and that sets it apart from the HTTPS Everywhere way of manually adding rules. A list with rulesets was used by the extension up until now for the purpose.Ī blog post on the EFF's Deeplinks site reveals that HTTPS Everywhere will switch to the rulesets of DuckDuckGo's Smart Encryption feature before it will reach End of Life eventually. The main idea behind the extension was to improve security by upgrading connections to HTTPS. an update in 2012 introduced weak encryption warnings, another in 2015 added thousands of new sites.

The extension was upgraded throughout the years, e.g. The extension would try to upgrade connections when users entered domain names, used HTTP, or clicked on HTTP links in the browser. The browser extension was released in 2010 to switch to encrypted (HTTPS) connections if possible.

Duckduckgo review 2021