> I'd love to either be able to do this ourselves or for the browsers to test the effectiveness of their own UIs.
That'd be pretty cool. A flag you could set (probably in head > meta) that instructs the browser to use a default padlock instead of a fancy EV name for display HTTPS info. That'd obviate the need to have two separate HTTPS endpoints for your app too. Combined with User-Agent verification you could infer what % of clients respect the flag and what % impact (if any) it has on their conversion habits.
Course I doubt browser vendors would be up for adding something like this. Would probably be a pain as the rendering code would be separate from the display of the overall chrome.
Then:
Compared to now: I'd love to either be able to do this ourselves or for the browsers to test the effectiveness of their own UIs.