Let's Encrypt is 10 years old now

Hands down one of the greatest services out there, stopped a racket and made the internet secure.

I remember a time when having an HTTPS connection was for "serious" projects only because the cost of the certificate was much higher than the domain. You go commando and if it sticks then you purchase a certificate for a 100 bucks or something.

There's still enough people out there who don't know better, manually (or auto-renew) purchasing new a certificate every year from their hosting provider like it's 2013.

AFAIK there's things like Extended Validation Certificate Verification that used to make the browser address bar look more trustworthy by making it green but I don't know if its still a thing. At least in Safari, I don't see a green padlock anywhere.

Chrome 77 removed the prominent green EV badge. "A series of academic research in the 2000s studied the EV UI in lab and survey settings, and found that the EV UI was not protecting against phishing attacks as intended. The Chrome Security UX team recently published a study that updated these findings with a large-scale field experiment, as well as a series of survey experiments." [1]

Extended Validation can still play a role in a corporate's IT control framework; the extended validation is essentially a check-of-paperwork that then doesn't need to be performed by your own auditor. Some EV certificates also come with some (probably completely useless) liability insurance.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/%2B/HEAD/docs...

> Some EV certificates also come with some (probably completely useless) liability insurance.

Warranties / insurance on SSL certificates typically only pay out if a certificate is issued improperly, often in conjunction with other conditions like a financial loss directly resulting from the misissuance. Realistically, any screwup serious enough to result in that warranty paying out would also result in the CA being abruptly removed from browser root certificate programs.