My beloved Firefox has been doing something strange when it tries to view websites that have certificate problems such as expired certificates. For some reason my desktop computer would pop up a bland dialog box whining about the site uses an invalid security certificate. My laptop doesn't seemt to do this. Apparently no-one on the internet has ever experienced this problem so I felt it would be useful to share the solution with folks.
Here is the alert box:
Thanks to a lovely person who goes by cor-el on the mozilla support website, I got the following solution which I am translating so it will be comprehensible to mere mortals. (For Techies: You should set the browser.xul.error_pages prefs to true on the about:config page.)
Essentially it involves the following steps:
- Type about:config into firefox where you would normally type a URL. (see screen shot)
- type browser.xul in the Search box
- double click on the line that says: browser.xul.error_pages.enabled and making certain that the Value is true.
When Firefox is configured correctly (Don't ask me how it became unconfigured..) the dialog looks like this:
This peson also kindly offered a little more information about how to fiddle with the about:config options in firefox. Be gentle - you can break some stuff.
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.
And while we are here, you can find the stored certificates at Tools / options / advanced tab / view certificates / servers tab.