DESIGNSOLS

Effective from September 1, 2020, Safari, which is the official browser of Apple, will no longer accept SSL/TLS certificates that are older than 398 Days (Roughly 13 months). This is a big news for almost all IT professionals so I think it deserves a place on Designsols blog Although, right now, it seems to be a unilateral decision by Safari only yet who knows if all other browsers follow the same path. In my opinion, sooner or later, they will apply this restriction too.
Being IT professionals, most of us do need to buy SSL/TLS certificates for either our own websites or for our client’s. It seems that from now on it is probably wiser to adopt a habit to select only a one-year plan while buying SSL/TLS certificates. September is not too far.
Safari as a browser has a user percentage between 12% to 18% in 2020 so even if safari alone shows an “Insecure Website” label on your website, it will not only affect your traffic but will also put a real bad impression on your visitors. However, one thing worth noting is, this change will only be effective for the certificates bought after August 31, 2020, any certificate you bought before won’t show insecure even If it gets older than 13 months in its life time (or at least that’s what I know so far).
How we should see this move by Safari (Apple): We have to admit that all of us saw this coming already. Previously SSL/TLS certificated could be purchased for 5 years, then after a security compromise, the time period got reduced to 3 years then later 2 years again. The pattern was already there, you just needed a watchful eye to see it coming to a standard period of one year. Yes, this move will make the website annual maintenance a bit harder of some webmasters, especially those who have thousands of websites to take care of but still It is not a bad thing to take measures to improve security so all of us should welcome this move.