Chrome 90 Defaults to HTTPS, Adds AV1 Codec for Optimized Video Conferencing Thursday April 15, 2021 1:09 am PDT by Tim Hardwick Google today rolled out Chrome 90 to its stable channel, introducing automatic preference for HTTPS sites over the HTTP protocol, plus some other notable changes. By default, Chrome will now redirect all websites to use the more secure HTTPS protocol. Encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS), HTTPS secures communication over networks by authenticating the website and protecting the privacy of data in transit. MacRumors.com has supported HTTPS for some time now. In addition, Chrome 90 adopts the AV1 codec for optimized video conferencing with WebRTC. The new codec should improve compression efficiency and reduce bandwidth consumption while improving video quality, and improve connectivity on low bandwidth connections. Screen sharing is also said to be more efficient when compared to the VP9 codec.