I’m trying to find out if Eclipse allows for the same, or if there’s a plugin.

John

The problem – you want to test a web site where you get a popup to accept an unrecognised certificate, eg when using a self-generated certifictate. Selenium cannot click on the resulting confirmation window, but worse still Selenium does not store your decision even though you have selected ‘permanently accept’ manually the first time.

The solution – basically Selenium is launching a clean copy of the browser each time. So you need to create a persistent profile to use each time

http://clearspace.openqa.org/message/31350

suggests using a custom firefox Profile

unfortunately, it seems the -firefoxProfileTempate flag doesn’t work

of course, neither does the -trustAllSSLCertificates flag

The above link by the Firefox employee responsible, who accuses anyone of complaining of calling him dumb, but then proceeds to evade the question as if he really doesn’t understand it — which might be possible. He actually seems to not understand the usability issues, but is very disingenuous about the security implications, and refuses to acknowledge the real bug.

The one thing he is correct on is that warnings about SSL sites are not new. The difference now (and the reason everyone is up in arms) is that you can’t work around it (without the RCE plugin).

They have a big friendly window (which used to be a more user-friendly pop-up dialog) that says “Permanently store this exception” in small print, but it doesn’t do it. It’s a bug. You can disagree about whether it should be permitted (and be wrong) but if you’re not going to allow it, don’t say you do.

I don’t think of Stack Overflow as much of a social networking site, but I do enjoy the “badges” and appreciate those reputation scores. On the downside, the site is SOOOO full of experts that I don’t often get a chance to answer a question. You have to be fast!

Thanks for the comment. Stack Overflow has exceeded all expectations. I think it being community driven is a large part of that. Not it’s social networking aspect, but the buy in it has received from developers thanks to Jeff and Joel. Even then, if it hadn’t been so well executed, it wouldn’t work.

I like your site CriticalResults.com too. I’m just starting out consulting, mainly QA, but also some business solutions. Of course, I want to get rid of terms like ‘consulting’ and ‘business solutions’ and your site is a good example of a well written, informal approach.

Rather, I’d say that language isn’t perfect, and precision, rather than fluidity, is the problem.

English has been “fixed” for longer than most other languages, while continuing to grow. Due in no small part to the KJV Bible and Shakespeare, however archaic they may seem to most people now. A body of standard works, as well as the dynamic usage enabled by the standardization is what brings value to the language. You can make the exact same observation with programming languages. But I don’t want to attract that kind of “blog lovin’” here.

Regarding your post, I particularly like this quote:

“I encourage you to consider the distinction, and to make it explicit when you can”

I think we can both agree that being aware of the distinction is the key factor, the naming of which enables us to think about it. (I like DHH’s talk here http://bit.ly/1aBbel) Although it sounds like we are make two distinctions which might have mostly overlapping sets of cases. Exploring the differences and similarities could be interesting, though I don’t know yet if it will be worthwhile.