Firefox 3, which set a one-day record for downloads recently, has been reconfigured in a way that's setting off alarms for webmasters who haven't renewed their SSL certificates. As the US Army just learned, Firefox won't bring up sites with self-assigned and/or expired certificates.
At least, not without some extensive hoop-jumping.
If you're a merchant you should know that an SSL certificate encrypts data transmissions between two computers. Credit card information, for example, is protected during transmission between those two computers.
But we're assuming you know that and that yours is up to date.
If not, your site could be one of the estimated tens of thousands of websites virtually inaccessible via Firefox, the world's second-most used Web browser. This isn't entirely new to Firefox. Previous versions treated websites with similar issues in a similar way; a pop-up warning not vouching for the site was simple to bypass in a single click.
The new policy, points out
Critics believe this process may be a bit too ominous for the average user. "The geeks" at Royal Pingdom write:
Perhaps the error message (and the whole procedure) could have been presented a bit differently to make it easier for inexperienced users to understand, especially now that Firefox is entering the mainstream and is getting a wider user base.
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