Dear Opera: Please don’t be so over-protective

It’s the little things that drive me nuts.

For example, when people talk about why they don’t use Opera, they will often talk about sites that don’t work with Opera. When I ask, they can almost never remember an example.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that means that they are wrong.

While I don’t often find myself with sites that won’t work, it does occasionally happen, and it seems to happen to me most often when I am trying to check out of some online store, which usually means that I have to go to another browser and refill my cart and re-enter my shipping and related info.

Here’s the latest example. I was checking out of the online store at alban.org when Opera showed me this:

Yowsa! “This certificate has been revoked by its issuer”?!?!?! That sounds like something terribly dastardly must have gone on. What did they do to get their SSL certificate revoked? I’ve never heard of such a thing happening.

Thinking that it might not be as fatal sounding as Opera made it out to be, I copied the URL to Firefox. Of course then I had to go back and re-enter all my cart items. When I went to checkout this time, I wondered what Firefox would say:

Ah…. So that’s it. Opera was complaining because I had typed in “alban.org” rather than “www.alban.org”

That’s it?

Now, granted that if there were my online store, I would make sure that anyone who asked for “alban.org” was automatically redirected to “www.alban.org” but this isn’t the first time I have seen this happen.

Q: What should a browser do in this situation?

A: Whatever it should do, Opera isn’t doing it well.

One could argue (from a security extremist’s point of view) that Opera is doing the right thing to protect users from potentially malicious sites. But Opera isn’t doing it well.

Let’s look at the error more closely.

You tried to access the address https://alban.org/CartCC2.asp which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the Web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.

This is almost verbatim what you see when you type in an URL and the page isn’t available. That is to say: this looks like a generic error message from Opera. It shouldn’t.

As an aside: I have always thought that any browser ought to be able to tell whether I typed in an address (error prone) or not. Opera ought to be able to tell that I clicked on a link to get to this page, and did not type it in. So suggesting that I check my spelling is foolish.

Secure connection: fatal error (44)

25 Geek Cred Points for Opera showing us an actual error message. This could be useful in diagnosing the problem. I say “could” because I don’t honestly know if it would be or not.

The certificate has been revoked by its issuer

As I said above, it certainly sounds severe. But is it true? Is that what error code 44 means?

Let’s compare that with Firefox’s error:

Ok, the first thing I have to comment on is the font size.

Note to Firefox programmers: not all of us are 18 with 20/20 vision. That’s a heck of a lot of type in a small space. And why? Do you really think anyone is browsing with a window 362 pixels wide? Give me a bigger font, some more line height, and I’ll be happier.

The good part is that Firefox is doing several things right. The default actions here are to either Cancel (protect the user) or “View Certificate” So if I am Joe Average User and just hit ENTER, I’m not going to do anything nefarious.

Even better is the explanation.

You have attempted to establish a connection with “alban.org”. However the certificate presneted belongs to “www.alban.org”. It is possible, though unlikely, that someone may be trying to intercept your communication with this web site.

It wasn’t until I saw this that I realized that I had put in alban.org instead of www.alban.org. Once I realized what the error was, I realized how foolish it was.

Then I clicked “OK”

Firefox gave me the information I needed to make a decision, and then let me make the decision.

Opera threw up a confusing error message which may contain true information, but wasn’t helpful, and gave me no way to proceed, which meant that I had to switch to another browser, re-enter all my items into my cart, and then re-enter my shipping information.

While someone at Opera might say that this is protecting the user, the reality is that it did nothing but get in my way and put up a “ROAD CLOSED” sign where there should have been nothing more than a “PROCEED WITH CAUTION”

How many times would this happen to Joe/Joan Average User before he/she would switch to another browser?