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IE is braindead! (Wild card certs and https redirects)

Posted by Guy Naor Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:49:00 GMT

Sometimes I'm really amazed at the degree of brain-deadness in IE. And I have no doubts about recommending Firefox to everyone I talk to. "Nothing new here, what prompted your post?" you might ask.

We just released some small changes to Famundo to prevent IE from showing warnings for mixed http/https content. We use assets servers, but IE show warnings if the assets are served over http while the main content over https, so we switched to serving the assets over https if working with https pages.

But a new kind of warning hit us when we did the switch. Now IE would complain that our asset servers don't match the certificate. We have a wildcard certificate for *.famundo.com. It worked fine until now, but when we made the asset servers appear as: 1.app.famundo.com, 2.app.famundo.com, etc., IE said the certificate doesn't match the site. Needless to say Firefox didn't complain at all. The solution to this problem was changing the assets urls to 1.famundo.com, 2.famundo.com, etc. Now all browsers are happy.

Then, a different problem came up. When redirecting from the secure login page to the non-secure regular pages, IE would show a warning, and not even let you check it. Apparently this is a known issue. So we had to change the redirections we were using to trick IE by using reload meta command. Please note that returning a 400 status as described in the link above, doesn't work. Just return a regular 200 status and it works. In Rails we changed it from:

redirect_to("http://" + request.host + request.request_uri)

to:

render(:text => %Q[<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://#{request.host}/#{request.request_uri}">])

I hope this help someone else with similar problems. And do yourself and the web a favor - switch to Firefox!

Posted in  | 3 comments

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Comments

  1. pcx99 said about 2 hours later:

    Good thing your pages don't use javascript's prompt command or you'd have another thing to add to your list ;)

  2. Guy Naor said about 2 hours later:

    I'm happy we are getting more and more Firefox users! The share of Firefox has benn constantly growing for us. And not only here in the blog which is developers oriented. Even the main Famundo website and the application itself.

  3. Craig Francis said about 15 hours later:

    I second the FireFox vote... actually, I would say any alternative browser, as Opera, Safari, iCab etc all work really well.

    And as a side note, for those using PHP, I normally have this little 'goto' function available on my websites...

    function goto($goto) {

    if (isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on') {
    if (preg_match('/http:\/\//', $goto)) {
        header('Refresh: 0; URL=' . $goto);
        exit('<a href="' . htmlentities($goto) . '">Loading...</a>');
    }
}

header('Location: ' . $goto);
exit('<p>Goto <a href="' . htmlentities($goto) . '">next page</a></p>');
    }

    Sorry if the indenting does not work, but I bet you can guess what the main body of this function is for (yes, the retarded browser).

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