How to Enable TLS 1.3 in Chrome, Safari and Firefox?

Procedure to enable TLS 1.3 in your favorite browsers

Are you taking advantage of TLS 1.3 enhanced performance and security?

TLS 1.3 draft working version was released in 2017 and glad to see many websites have adopted this.

If you are a website owner, then you can consider enabling it today. Check out my previous article about how to enable TLs 1.3 in Apache, Nginx and Cloudflare.

But how about client-side – browsers?

Chrome starting from 63 version and Firefox 61 have started supporting TLS 1.3, and if your browser doesn’t support this yet, then you are missing the performance and privacy features.

Enabling TLS 1.3 in Chrome

• Launch Chrome
• Type the following in the address bar and hit Enter

chrome://flags/#tls13-variant

Ensure it’s not disabled. You can select Default or Enabled.

• Relaunch Chrome for setting to be effective

Enabling TLS 1.3 in Firefox

• Launch Firefox
• Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter
• Start typing tls.version in a search, and you should see the following

• Ensure security.tls.version.max value is 4
• If not, double-click on it to modify to 4.

Enabling TLS 1.3 in Safari

• Open the terminal and become a root

sudo su - root

• Type the following command and hit Enter

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.networkd tcp_connect_enable_tls13 1

• Relaunch Safari to enjoy the benefits.

Browser Test for TLS 1.3

How do you ensure your browser supports the latest TLS version? There are a few tools you can use it.

Just hit the following page to test it.

Browser experience security check by Cloudflare – this is how a result looks when a browser supports it.

How’s My SSL – check SSL/TLS protocol compatibility, known vulnerability support.

I hope this quick instruction help you to enable the latest TLS 1.3 version in Chrome and Firefox.