Pardon my ignorance, but have we seen significant man in the middle phishing? Or do you refer to DNS poisoning phishing as MITM? While TLS is always good, DNS poisoning should be fixed by authenticating DNS. Try as I might, you can't yet convince sites to go all encrypted, they think it costs too much.

One of the errors of the original design was that you put whether you wanted encryption in the protocol part of the URL, ie. http vs. https. The right way would have been to also have the browser provide encryption information in the fetch request, and the answer come back encrypted and certified if the server supports the encryption. This does not encrypt the URL itself, so it's good to have https or just remember certificates, but it's a lot better than what we have now.

I can send you, via https to the [EFF Web site](https://www.eff.org) but in practice nobody does this. In theory, you can't because you can't be sure the browser supports https, though in fact they almost all do today.

However, while a MITM can defeat any non-secured connection, I think that's very rare today and so lesser approaches can work.

If we're ready to move to a whole new system, then ordinary passwords over SSL way too little to grasp at. We could have a serious authentication system that is much harder to crack, and even lets you roam to internet cafes with some safety etc.