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Comment by nandhp | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to get SSL error messages in Firefox?

https://irc.verylegit.link/0x8c*download()194mobiads(windows... is supposed to redirect to Facebook, and it does if you use HTTP. However, over HTTPS Firefox just gives me a very generic "Secure Connection Failed" message. (Chrome is rather more helpful, giving me "ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED".)

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Where did you get that link? Was it one of the sample links? I don't think those are real links. But if you type in https://facebook.com and click "Make it look dodgy" it will give you a real link.

http://hey.look.a.verylegit.link/malware-425iphone)ip-steale...(.docx.html.rar

Edit: Although it appears Hacker News decided to mangle this link that I posted. Apparently it's not happy about mismatched parenthesis in links. Why HN wants to try to match parenthesis in links... that's a good question.

Markdown uses parenthesis? HN software parses markdown in comments to format them?

HN doesn't use Markdown, it has its own eccentric and much more limited markup system.

I get this in Firefox 55:

http://megg.ml/i/771715c9c2445b972e07fa529c6fdb4a.PNG

Note the second line, "The connection to irc.verylegit.link was interrupted while the page was loading." Does that show up for you?

Click the (i) icon to the left of the URL in the address bar, the the `>` button, then “More information” at the bottom. The technical details say the connection is not encrypted.

Yes, I found that, but that's not even an inadequate error message -- it's just wrong. Firefox has no way to tell if the connection is encrypted or not because the connection is being dropped while the encryption is being established.

So a connection that doesn't exist cam hardly be encrypted now can it? Scnr

But yeah I noticed this trend too in browsers, it's getting harder to get to the technical bits every time they try to make these warnings more user friendly. I usually switch to openssl s_client in a terminal at this point.

A general trend.

I've been aware of it since Linus Torvalds pointed out that so called "ux-improvements" were actually ux problems back in gnome 2.

UX-ers here (hopefully there must be a few ones from Google and Mozilla here): please help stop this long trend of dumbification. I'm not asking you to make it like bash and vim just to stop hiding menus, removing settings etc etc.

Show that it decreases conversions and then maybe people will stop doing it

Complain about how hard it is to get to the details of a bad cert if you want, but this instance does not exemplify the trend you're referring to.

This is one of only HTTPS errors that you aren't required to click through to uncover the details of the error—the connection is being shut down.

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