Among the major new security features is a technology known as opportunistic encryption, which is designed to encrypt potentially sensitive data that would otherwise have been sent unencrypted and in the clear.
“Opportunistic encryption is meant to improve the transport properties of legacy HTTP resources that would otherwise be carried in clear text,” Patrick McManus, platform engineer at Mozilla, told eWEEK. “Any TLS [Transport Layer Security] certificate, including self-signed ones, may be used with opportunistic encryption because it does not enforce authentication. Servers must run either HTTP/2 or SPDY/3.1.”