Happy Birthday EV SSL Certificates!

Extended Validation SSL certificates are now a year old. They are experiencing constant growth and now make up 0.5% of valid commercial SSL certificates.

Netcraft reports that there were only 81 sites using EV SSL Certificates when they were surveyed at this time last year. There are now over 4,000. They also explained that growth will continue to increase due to the AutoUpdate of Internet Explorer to version 7 and the new version of Firefox.

For users of Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 turns the address bar green when a user visits a site which offers a valid EV SSL certificate, helping to boost consumer confidence in such sites and reduce fraud. By default, Windows XP users will not see the green address bar unless they install an optional Root Certificates Update, which will enable the use of EV SSL certificates.

In addition to the Internet Explorer 7 push, nightly builds of the Firefox web browser now also support EV SSL certificates, using the VeriSign EV root for testing purposes. Other EV SSL certificates are currently treated as conventional SSL certificates, although when Firefox 3 is ready to be released to the public, it is expected to have full support for all EV SSL certificates.

Larry Seltzer has also commented on the anniversary:

It's one year since the introduction of EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificates, and growth has been pretty good.

I remain skeptical of how much good EV-SSL does, but I'm sure it does some. And while there are lots of EV certs out there (for instance, I just saw one the other day buying checks from Checks In The Mail) other major sites like Bank of America still don't have them deployed.

Extended Validation SSL Certificates now 1 Year Old - [Netcraft]

Originally posted on Sun Feb 17, 2008