I recently installed a plugin for my blog to help with one of the daily tasks I do, only to find out that it is improperly coded, such that it requests resources using HTTP, even though I access my admin section through HTTPS. With all the latest findings on how insecure the web is and the CookieMonster tool by Mike Perry in the wild, this is not a risk I’m willing to accept. The developers of the plugin are completely unresponsive, so I figured I’ll just block my browser from loading mixed mode content (HTTP and HTTPS).
Here comes the fun part. I am a heavy Firefox user and use IE only occasionally. The problem is that Firefox doesn’t have such a feature. It has a dialog box warning you about mixed mode content, but it doesn’t prevent downloading plaintext content. It is rarely that I feel IE is doing much better than Firefox*, but in this case I have to give it the thumbs up, since it actually has a setting to disallow loading of insecure content.
After hunting around the web for a way to disable mixed mode content from loading in Firefox, the only thing I could find is an extension developed by Standford people - ForceHTTPS. Their paper is an informative read if you are not familiar with the problems with mixing content, but alas their extension does not work with the latest version of Firefox : (. I tried contacting them, but so far I haven’t gotten any response. I wish Firefox will include such a setting in the core browser, but if not, I might be forced to write a similar extension myself. If someone knows of other extensions that do this, let me know.