Phasing out TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 in Chrome and Firefox postponed

30 March 2020

At the end of 2018, Mozilla and Google announced to phase out support for the outdated encryption protocols TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. by early 2020. However, due to the current situation with COVID-19 (Corona), they have decided to postpone the phasing out of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Firefox and Chrome for the time being.

Why this postponement?

No longer supporting these protocols can affect the availability of websites and (outdated) applications that use the outdated versions. COVID-19 reduces employee availability worldwide. The browsers therefore give as a reason for this recent change, on the one hand, a lack of own capacity, on the other hand to give users more time to upgrade. Municipalities in particular often still use outdated systems for frequently used applications, and currently also have less capacity to upgrade.

Chrome is currently fully focused on fixing browser vulnerabilities and will postpone other updates until further notice. In Firefox, TLS 1.0 and 1.1 from version 74 (dating from the beginning of March) were already no longer accepted, but this has recently been reversed.

More information

The reason for the phasing out of TLS 1.0 and 1.1. and information about TLS in general you can read here.