Enabling SSL2 in Firefox 2

Well, I had upgraded my Firefox 1.5.0.7 to Firefox 2 as soon as it came out. Apart from the icons and the look, as a user I didn’t notice any difference. But I had to disable/uninstall a lot of extensions as they were not compatible with Firefox 2. I especially loved the Upload to ImageShack extension. Anyways, I thought a few sacrifices were needed to be on the bleeding edge.

Until today.

Today, I went to my ISP’s site and tried to log in.

Firefox 2 balked at me “Firefox can’t connect securely”. Here is a snapshot (click to enlarge) :

Now, I said to myself, “This would not do. It is very judgmental of a software to decide which site I can visit and which I cannot.” I looked at all the options and cannot find anything that can solve this issue. So I decided to do it the old fashioned way. I typed in “about:config” in the address bar and pressed enter.

Scrolling through the list I found a few boolean entries which seemed to be related to SSL2. SSL2 is the encryption method which my ISP uses. SSL3 is the new technology and will eventually replace SSL2. Anyways, I decided to switch their vales and see what happens. All of them were set to false. I changed their values to true. and tried logging in again.

Voila!!! I am now connected.

I decided that there will be many users facing this problem, so here is a step-by-step procedure to do what I did.

1. Start Mozilla Firefox 2.
2. Type in about:config in the address bar. Here is a snapshot :
   
3. Now in the page that comes up type in “ssl2” in the Filter textbox. You will get something like this (click for a larger image) :
   
4. Now set them all to true, like this (click for a larger image) :
   

You are done. Now try opening whatever site you were trying to open earlier.