Firefox ain't misbehavin' with SSL errors

When Firefox 3.0.1 tosses back what looks like an error page from a site with an expired or self-signed SSL certificate, it's acting the way Firefox is meant to do.


So after noting Royal Pingdom's observation about Firefox's seemingly odd SSL behavior, I heard back from Mozilla's outstanding team via Twitter.

"The Firefox expired, or self-signed certificate UI requiring several steps to add an exception behaves as it was designed to," Mozilla said in a tweet from Firefox Answers. "It returns a cert-specific error page."

Other than a small link to change Firefox's behavior, where the user embarks on those several steps to modify how Firefox handles a site's balky certificates, Mozilla's approach to communicating this needs improvement.

If there's a way to do so, I'm confident Mozilla will do it. The process should be much more intuitive than it is today.