Firefox Anoyances

It's been a few weeks since the latest was released onto an expectant world. I have to say all things considered its a blinder of a release. The "Awesome bar" is indeed made of Awesome and the whole browser has been on a much needed diet, uses less memory and runs faster. The native theming also looks good on Fliss' Mac.

There is however one small annoyance. As part of the security setup it is now a lot more explicit about "bad" SSL certificates. In this case bad means not signed by a recognised Certificate Authority. Unfortunately there are a lot of self signed certificates out there (including ones I've generated) and the authorising of them sequence has added an extra mouse click as the certificate has to be fetched and examined before you can add the exception.

Unsigned SSL certificates aren't always bad. The fact your running under SSL does mean stuff is encrypted. Once you have authorised a certificate if it changes you will still get a warning if the signature changes (indicating the server your talking to may not be the same one as last time, i.e. a potential hijacker). However these are probably subtleties you don't want to inflict on the masses who just like to see a padlock (with optional green address bar) to make their judgement on the safety of the site. However I would like a "yeah I know, I won't be divulging my bank details to this site thanks" button. Us power users are never satisfied!