In October 1994, with the launch of Netscape Navigator beta and the Netsite Commerce Server, Netscape introduces HTTPS as an encrypted HTTP extension operating over SSL natively in the browser. Initially reserved for payment and banking pages, HTTPS becomes the universal web standard after Google's 2014 policy penalizing non-HTTPS sites in search rankings; by 2025 over 95% of global web traffic is HTTPS-encrypted. Its 1994 introduction is the direct technical prerequisite for scalable e-commerce.