We have all seen the screen whether its Chrome, FireFox or Internet Explorer when we visit a web site with Self Signed certificates or where the browser things there is something not right. In Chrome you get the bright red screen, in FireFox you get the crossing guard image and in IE the Shield. If it's one of your own sites you just hit the button that says continue on and ignore the message.

One of the features in windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9 was the feature that allows you to pin a website to you taskbar. Then it shows up with the favicon as the icon and opens right to your site. Awesome feature right? I thought so and began using and it and did for about 4 months through the Internet Explorer beta up to the full release of IE9.

About a month ago I was issued a ticket at work to debug some issues with our site that required me to use HTTPS and since we use self signed certificates I fully expected to see those messages, which I did see just that. Then I started looking around the page for my continue option, but after looking around for a while there wasn't any (see Image below.)

Internet Explorer Pinned Certificate Error

As you can see in the image above there is no link to click to continue on. I began to look into settings, try adding the site to trusted sites, adding the certificate and so many other options and nothing was working. I started poking around Google trying to find any bit of information I could find that would give me some clue as to what was going on. After spending an hour or so and not finding any thing and having a couple other things to take care of. I started Internet Explorer 9 through the start menu link to hit a different site that requires Internet Explorer 9 and when I completed my work there I went to go back to my original issue but this time not in my Pinned site from my task bar but from my regular Internet Explorer 9 icon, and as you can see from the image below our "Continue to this website" options is there.

Internet Explorer Certificate Error

If you have a site that you work on and check in Internet Explorer 9 and it uses self signed certificates. You will not be able to use it as a pinned (application) site as you will not be able to actually get to the site.

This entry was posted on April 12, 2011 at 10:53 AM and has received 2796 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.