Firefox 3 features II - Certificate warnings

In my previous blog posts I talked about how people unjustly advertised Internet Explorer 7 as inferior to Firefox 2. I can't be sure but I think most of them were just blindly taking side (cause within the tech community, supporting open source makes you geeky, and to these losers, being geeky is strangely a good thing...). The truth is, IE7 came with alot of good features not found in Firefox 2. Case in point, another new Firefox 3 feature comes right out of Internet Explorer 7 is its HTML based invalid certificate warning.

Traditionally browsers and its helper components (such as Java) produce alot of popups, so much so people no longer read the warnings before they hit enter. But the prevalence of online shopping and banking makes it important to root out impersonated sites, and that sometimes means a stronger warning to the user not to enter a site if its certificate is not trusted.

While Firefox 2 still showed a much-ignored-too-wordy-too-geeky-dialog...


... Internet Explorer 7 had abandoned its dialog and forced the user to make a conscious decision with a web page based warning.


This switch is a good thing, so much so, Firefox 3 followed suit.


But in my opinion, the folks at Mozilla still haven't gotten it right. Showing the error code that's utterly useless to the user adds to the confusion, not to mention it forces a permanent add of an untrusted certificate to the certificate store. That's no biggie of course. What I am upset about is seeing people who don't know their shit write reviews on reputable magazines.