Preventing the user from loading pages that do not have a verified SSL certficate is a good security practice that most browsers follow. Usually, when you attempt to access a page with a self-signed SSL certificate, your browser will show a warning message but still allow you to proceed for cases where you know (or assume at your own risk) that the site is safe. In most cases, there is also exception handling for adding sites to an exception list, so that you are not bugged with the warning message everytime you try to access sites known to be safe by the user.
Unfortunately, as of its latest version -- r544 released on August 18 -- Haiku's native browser WebPositive does not handle SSL certificate verification exceptions; so if you hit a site with an unverified certificate, you get an error message and you are unable to proceed to the page. Here is a temporary workaround that will allow you to override this behaviour. Needless to say, use it at your own risk (you have been warned).
Last month we reported on a new version of the experimental port by Adrian Panasiuk of the open source Flash movie player Gnash. Development has continued, and after recent reports of it running quite nicely in Haiku, I decided to give it a spin to see how usable it was. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Gnash did in fact work quite nicely in Haiku. This tip gives step-by-step instructions on how to install Gnash, so that you can play YouTube videos in Haiku.
Preventing the user from loading pages that do not have a verified SSL certficate is a good security practice that most browsers follow. Usually, when you attempt to access a page with a self-signed SSL certificate, your browser will show a warning message but still allow you to proceed for cases where you know (or assume at your own risk) that the site is safe. In most cases, there is also exception handling for adding sites to an exception list, so that you are not bugged with the warning message everytime you try to access sites known to be safe by the user.
