916728 - "Save As" on a link to a site with an untrusted certificate gives an unhelpful error message

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130814063812

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence/wiki/Notaries
2. Right click, save as on the link: Trust Antagonism (https://www.antagonism.org/antagonism.notary)



Actual results:

3. Error "Unknown download error. Please try again"

When trying to save a file from a site with an unsigned certificate I get a strange error message: "Unknown download error" (translated from Swedish so might not be the exact same in US version).




Expected results:

An error that indicates that the issue concerns the certificate. 

When I left click on the download I get a certificate warning and I am able to bypass this and download the file.

Comment 1

[Loic]

Yes, in previous versions of Firefox, you saw a dialog box displaying the issue about the cerf and a 2nd dialog bow was open to select the destination folder of the file to download.

It has been removed in bug 682329.
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=8c82de08425d&tochange=c3a50afc2243

CC'ing Brian Smith to know if this behavior is normal.

Comment 2

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

I tested it in Chrome and it didn't work either.

We should show a better error message. I am not sure if we should spent effort to make it so the user can override the cert error to do the download.

Comment 3

[Cees T.]

The same happens on http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/beyond-jpeg.html when attempting to save the target of http://amd.streamload.com/d001120/Hosted/Jpeg2000/03.jp2 - Falsely claiming an "unknown error" occurred and asking to "try again." while following that link shows a clear "Server not found" message.