PayPal, the eBay owned company that runs online payment system said it plans to block the browsers that do not support EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Socket Layer) certificates. The EV SSL certificates are meant to provide trust to Web-based transactions, in IE 7 the website that have EV SSL certificate are displayed in green color in the address bar. Browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari don’t have EV SSL support and hence can be banned from accessing PayPal.com under the new plan. Firefox and Opera have announced that they will support EV SSL in upcoming release but Apple has announced no such plans for Safari. There is still a debating going on the effectiveness of EV SSL in protecting users against Phishing websites but PayPal’s Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett says that the green color in address bar makes it much easier for users to determine whether or not they’re on the site that they thought they were visiting.
[Via eWeek]