Members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have updated their popular HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin to offer automatic Web encryption to an additional 1,500 sites, twice as many as previously offered.

HTTPS Everywhere was introduced 2009 by the EFF in collaboration with members of the Tor anonymity project with the ambitious goal of encrypting the entire Web. When the browser extension is installed, users are automatically directed to a secure sockets layer version of many websites even when the "HTTPS" tag isn't included in the address. Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, and thousands of other sites are included, and more are added regularly. HTTPS Everywhere is available as an extension for Mozilla's Firefox browser and as an alpha extension for Google's Chrome browser.

"Today we released version 3.0 of HTTPS Everywhere, which adds encryption protection to 1,500 more websites, twice as many as previous stable releases," an announcement from the EFF stated. "Our current estimate is that HTTPS Everywhere 3 should encrypt at least a hundred billion page views in the next year, and trillions of individual HTTP requests."

A previous update to HTTPS Everywhere introduced an optional feature known as the Decentralized SSL Observatory. It detects and warns about possible man-in-the-middle attacks on websites a user is visiting. It works by sending a copy of the site's SSL certificate to the EFF's SSL Observatory. When EFF detects anomalies, it sends a warning to affected end users.