Well, I followed the directions on one of those "speed up firefox" pages, and found a setting that broke stuff, at least minimally, and it was hard to diagnose. The symptom was a red line through the padlock icon when viewing an ssl page that I wrote in PHP. If I reloaded the page, it would go back to normal.

I am also getting the 403 error from Google, that it says I have a virus. I think the problem is that I was searching too fast - I guess I need to slow down my reading. It appears to block you for some amount of time, and then let you back in. Or perhaps certain queries trigger it. It appears to happen more often with Firefox than with other browsers. I use a couple of proxy servers, and I think google doesn't like those either. But, I have used them for years, and today is the first time google complained, so I am not sure what is going on.There doesn't seem to be a solution for the google bug, although changing the user agent to look like IE seems to help some, although that might be my imagination.

For the SSL problem, I was able to fix it by setting browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to false. My theory is that the red line means the certificate is fine, but some items on the page are loaded from a non-https source (the cache). It would be nice if Firefox would display some text somewhere saying that is the problem, because currently the security dialog doesn't list any warnings, or any reason for the red-line to be there.
Posted by Jon Daley on December 13, 2005, 11:11 am | Read 2677 times
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A nifty little script that someone sent me today: Password Displayer. It will display the passwords you previously saved in Firefox.
This is useful because Firefox doesn't have a useful way to get the passwords out, other than "print screen"...
Note, you have to take the html file and save it to your computer and then load it. Firefox is smart enough to not send your passwords to other people by default.
If you are security-conscious, you should either not run this script, or read it, and make sure that it isn't going to send your passwords anywhere.
Posted by jondaley on December 13, 2005, 12:02 pm

Interesting, the same guy who I got the password displayer script, also has this page, where he warns you to backup your profile regularly, that it is quite prone to breaking.
I haven't had any trouble so far, but I have heard of people losing data in strange ways, so this is probably good advice, and I might even listen to it.
Posted by jondaley on December 13, 2005, 12:04 pm
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