manpages.ubuntu.com should support (and ideally default to) HTTPS

[Hanno Böck]

The web is moving towards HTTPS by default. manpages.ubuntu.com is currently only available via HTTP.

This is important even for content-only-sites like this, because HTTPS protects integrity and therefore can prevent tampering with the content (e.g. by injecting ads not authorized by the site owner, which often happens in public wifi networks).

The main ubuntu webpage has recently enabled HTTPS, see also:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1619240

[Dan (dannyhajj)]

It seems https://manpages.ubuntu.com supports HTTPS now, but it is still not defaulting to HTTPS though.

This is a problem still because Google has the manpages.ubuntu.com repository indexed with HTTP instead of HTTPS. So users coming in from the search engine will always default to HTTP.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

FYI, I do not know since when but the site is nowadays not only providing https but also auto-switching to https if you surf to it with a plain http:// url.

E.g.
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/ua.1.html
gets
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/ua.1.html
as you'd expect.