1370318 - Identity panel makes it hard to tell what's safe

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Site Identity, defect)

Description

[Greg]

Attachment: Firefox-screenshot.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Visited an https website that is not fully secure.


Actual results:

Firefox throws out all these icon/symbols in the identity section. A circled "i" is always displayed no matter the connection and another icon is posted over the lock icon.


Expected results:

I find this confusing and suggest that you guys simplify this. I have uploaded two screenshots: Chrome and Firefox. 

Look at Chrome. To me, this presentation is very clear and understandable.

Look at Firefox. I don't know what this is. Is it secure or not? There's definitely something not right but it involves dropping everything and investigating. Security/Identity things like this needs to be made simpler, not so much for me but for the general public that doesn't understand this stuff as well as we do. The general public wants to know if they can enter their credit card or not. Frankly, if everything on the site is not encrypted, the site isn't secure and presenting this middle ground with a bunch of traffic signs makes it very confusing.

I recommend the circled "i" only present on non-secure sites (ones that do not have a lock icon). And the other sign I don't think has real use. If the site is not full-on secure, it is not secure. Period.

Comment 1

[Greg]

Attachment: Chrome-screenshot.png

Comment 2

[YF (Yang)]

Frankly, I don't know the role and meaning of the "i".

Comment 3

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

This is a design decision and the people in charge of that decision have so far decided in favor of keeping the (i), also in the new Photon design. There are advantages to the (i), e.g. it shows permission and media sharing indicators and there's more visual consistency. We may revisit this decision and some point but I don't think we need to permanently track the issues around the (i) icon, since we would not currently accept a patch that removes this icon.