Self-signed IE

I’m writing this blog entry to let others know what to do if they are ever annoyed by the red-tinted address bar that you get in IE8 when you try to visit a secure SSL website using a self-signed certificate. This is quite common in development environments. The straightforward thing to do, that every developer knows, is to import the certificate into a trusted store, but for some unfathomable reason this is not so simple with IE8. Maybe it is not so unfathomable – Windows sucks as a development environment and assumes that all its users are idiots.

The catch in IE8 is that you cannot let IE8 decide where to store the certificate. You need to manually tell IE8, during the certificate import process, to put the certificate into the Trusted Root Certificate Authority Store. Once you do this, you will be able to see the certificate in the correct store – the annoying red-tinted address bar will disappear and a nice lock will appear instead.

But the most important thing is to never develop a browser specific application that cannot run in any other browser other than IE. If you do that your application is already broken even before it is ever used. There is no reason to stick with IE only because that just demonstrates your lack of insight into web development.

Frak it – idiocy is indiscriminate.

PS: I do not understand why I need to make infrastructural changes in order to support a wayang kulit – changes that will end up breaking a lot of things and require a lot of time to verify and then more time to undo.