Tag Archives: HTTPS

Even more problems with the IE 8 mixed content warning

September 09th, 2009 - 6:03PM

We have previously written about the pointless and confusing ‘Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely‘ message in IE 8. It is displayed by default when a secure web page attempts to use non-secure content such as images, javascript or CSS. That post has been so popular that it attracts 40% of the traffic to this blog. The IE 8 mixed content dialog is pointless because 99.9% of web users just want it to go away and let them get on with what they were doing. For the 0.1% of web surfers who do … Continue reading →

Fixing the IE 8 warning – ‘Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?’

April 04rd, 2009 - 11:39AM

In a previous blog post, we talked about the problem of using HTTP based resources, such as images, on a secure HTTPS page. Internet Explorer interrupts the download and displays a confirmation dialog whenever it detects the use of mixed content on a secure page. In IE 7 and ealier, this dialog would cause annoyance to users but generally didn’t cause any other significant problems. This was because it was worded in such a way that most users would click on the Yes button and allow non-secure content to be downloaded. However, the wording in the IE 8 version of this dialog … Continue reading →

How Secure Are Query Strings Over HTTPS?

February 02th, 2009 - 4:10PM

A common question we hear is “Can parameters be safely passed in URLs to secure web sites? ” The question often arises after a customer has looked at an HTTPS request in HttpWatch and wondered who else can see this data. For example, let’s pretend to pass a password in a query string parameter using the following secure URL: https://www.httpwatch.com/?password=mypassword HttpWatch is able to show the contents of a secure request because it is integrated with the browser and can view the data before it is encrypted by the SSL connection used for HTTPS requests: If you look in a … Continue reading →