alt Hacker News> There was already talk of needing HTTPS everywhere. Snowden's release got more support behind it, and brought the timeline forward.
Google made HTTPS default-on in 2010, but there was a toggle so that you could disable the forced use:
* https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2010/01/default-http...
In 2014 the toggle was removed and all connections were forced to HTTPS.
The Snowden revelations occurred in 2013:
The 2010 change was only for gmail. Search was 2011 [1] and other changes were post-2013. I was there at the time, and there was a huge internal reprioritization in response to the Snowden news, especially for internal traffic.
Related: https://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-https-usage
[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-s...