Remember Mismatched Domains -- Firefox Extension
Posted on Tuesday, June 06, 2006 at 2:57 PM by Randall
Companies get bought up by other companies all the time. When they do, the url of the old company generally gets changed to point to the web site of the new company. Normally, this doesn't cause any problems, but if the connection is a secure connection (https:), there are often problems with the site certificate. For example, every time you visit creditcardsite.com you get a warning that the site certificate is actually from largebankholdingcompany.com who bought them months or years ago but is too cheap to set up their web site and certificates so you don't get that popup warning every time you visit. While the warning is nice the first time, it gets annoying fast.
The Remember Mismatched Domains extension for Firefox and Thunderbird solves this problem. It adds a "Don’t warn me again about this certificate for this domain" checkbox to the Domain Mismatch and Expired Certificate warning windows. If you check it, the information (either the domain name/security certificate domain pair or certificate/expiration date pair) is stored and the next time you visit the site the site is compared to the stored data and if it matches, you don't get the popup warning.
While security experts may object because bypassing a warning like this might make it slightly easier to get spoofed, this extension seems like a good compromise between security and convenience to me. The security experts need to direct their comments to the companies causing these problems, not to end users trying to live with them.
Rating: 4.0
System: Mozilla Firefox Extension
License:
Open Source
Price: Free
Version: 1.27
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