How can I make Firefox to stop treating me as stupid/child in their error messages ?
How could I make Firefox to display informative error messages with complete available information it has, instead current guesswork ?
Currently Firefox displays errors only in following childish fashion:
"We cannot display page you requested, because some complex bad things with security were happened."
For example:
(quote begin) Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to market.yandex.ru.
- The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
- Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
Learn more… (link to silly page with useless list of all the bad things that could ever happen with your browser)
Report errors like this to help Mozilla identify and block malicious sites
Try again (button) (quote end)
What the hell ? Only guesswork without real information. How, the hell, I could know why you can't "verify" the page, what could I report "to website owner" and how website owner could fix an issue without extact debug information from your browser ?!
Such error messages is silliness and wasting my time. Browser could do such simple English explanatory guesswork like that if it want to, but it MUST report actual incident information it (only) has.
The last straw is false "More info" link, that contains no actual incident information behind that. I can treat that only as mockery. IMHO that link should be renamed to truthful.
I understand, that guesswork messages are intended for users, unfamiliar with informational technologies, but it should not only info available to user.
Please develop software, suitable to educated people too.
All Replies (4)
The error messages are simplistic because not everyone has a strong understanding of technology.
In most cases, the error screen that you receive will contain an error code, like SEC_ERROR_OCSP_INVALID_SIGNING_CERT for example.
The error code is the technical explanation into what's going wrong. That is what you pass along to the website administrators.
We have also listed the most common error codes and their potential causes in the What do the security warning codes mean? documentation.
Hi hate2registereachdamnsite, there are two different error pages. One provides much more information, and the one you're seeing for that site unfortunately provides less.
For that particular site, there is nothing wrong with the certificate and I can connect using Firefox 66 on Windows, so it isn't a problem with the built-in ciphers. Perhaps it is something about your configuration or connection that Firefox doesn't understand how to describe?
You could check one or both of the consoles to see whether you can find more detailed information:
- Web Console (current tab): https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/Web_Console
- Browser Console (all tabs): https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/Browser_Console
You can try the Firefox version from the official Mozilla server if you currently use a version from the repositories of your Linux distribution.
Thank you for your respond,
Wesley Branton: Unfortunatelly, there was no even such code (nor Advanced button), only quoted explanation.
jscher2000: I don't expect explanation to any possible fail case, but it could be at least a simple fail context - method, arguments and actual exception code/dedug message ... Browser console facilities make sense, I'll try them thank you.
cor-el: Yes, I have repository version installed, that could be pretty old, it could be resonable to look how actual verison behaves itself.