US Army fails at SSL, confuses Firefox

As many as 108,000 websites may cause Firefox 3 to throw up a Page Not Found error because of an expired SSL certificate. One site of note failed this test, the official site for the US Army.



I've seen the occasional quirk in Firefox 3 where a valid page simply doesn't load. A quick refresh does the trick, but it happens enough to be noticeable, and a web browser shouldn't be notable for such things.

My pals at monitoring firm Pingdom said Firefox 3 showed this odd behavior for a lot of sites, all with one thing in common: an expired or a self-signed SSL certificate.

Rather than showing a message about the problematic certificate, Firefox 3 gives back a standard error. Not a good thing, said Pingdom:

To get past this error page, users have to go through four different steps before they can access the website, which from a usability standpoint is far from ideal.

This way of handling websites with expired or self-signed SSL certificates is bound to scare away a lot of inexperienced users, no matter how legitimate the website is.

Mozilla's engineers regularly overcome little browser problems, and this one should be no different. It's an odd one to fall through the cracks of the QA process. Maybe Mozilla CEO John Lilly needs to ask why it did.