Problem with SelfSSL and Firefox 3

Question

I have a IIS website with a security certificate setup using SelfSSL (part of the IIS Resources toolkit). The certificate appears valid when I view it in ISS and it works fine for IE, Safari and Google Chrome. However, in Firefox 3 it does not consider the certificate valid and therefore shows a certificate warning when you view a secure page on the website.

This is only a problem because I am using Selenium to automatically test the site. I have tried using custom Firefox profiles to solve this problem and this works ok with one IIS site. But when each developer has their own site you have to keep adding exceptions to this custom profile.

I can use other browsers for the Selenium scripts, but I would rather use Firefox (the form input on IE seems to run much slower than Firefox).

I think the easiest way around this problem is to have valid certificates in the first place, hence I started using SelfSSL. Any ideas why Firefox doesn't seem to take any notice?

Answer 1

SelfSSL does not generate a valid certificate - it generates a self signed one. To get a valid certificate you have to buy one from a certificate authority.

If your IE, Chrome or Safari do not show a warning when visiting your secured page it means that you have added this new certificate to trusted certificates database of your account. You can do this in Firefox too - it just has a separate database. But your every user has to do this for himself.