Comment 5 for bug 392691

I've had trouble with that new bug reporting feature you mentioned, so I have mostly been bypassing it. I should try to go back to it to see if the bugs have been worked out of the bug reporting...

As regards this bug, I just installed Firefox 3.5, and I can confirm that the same problem exists there, too. I don't know how to link the two reports, but there is a separate discussion of this same problem involving the GlobalSign certificate. I'm not an expert, so I can't really say, but if I understand the situation roughly correctly, IE is doing some sloppy and basically unsafe form of error recovery. The actual error is in the configuration of the NTTPC server and involves some intermediate certificates, but the NTTPC people are either incompetent or anti-Firefox, or both. (I have trouble buying the pure incompetence explanation, since they are part of the conglomerate of the largest phone company in Japan, and ostensibly are major players in the Japanese Internet. Other subsidiaries focus on backbone services and portable phones, for examples.) However, because Microsoft gets to ram their standards down everyone's throats, it seems that Firefox should handle the situation differently.

When I think about it that way, it seems the proper solution would be for Firefox to check for the IE-only situation and explain why Microsoft's so-called solution is bad. Users would still have the manual override, with or without the permanent option, but the blame for the situation would be properly distributed between Microsoft and the anti-Firefox websites. (Alternatively, Firefox could adopt Microsoft's flawed implementation, but I don't like bad standards just because Microsoft said so.)