Sunday 14 November 2004

"Firefox and www.amazon.co.uk cannot communicate securely"

This is just a "For Your Information" in case somebody else encounters the same error message with Firefox:

I have tried to order some DVDs from www.amazon.co.uk but I am having trouble getting authenticated because Firefox is rejecting the connection with the following message:

Firefox and www.amazon.co.uk cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms

This is the new Firefox 1.0 and I have been ordering stuff with www.amazon.co.uk for years back when Firefox was known as Phoenix.

I did a search on google using the following keywords: "firefox and * cannot communicate securely" and got three or four hits.

In order to eliminate SSL issues at my end, I logged into websites where I have accounts (using Firefox) and made sure I was authenticated with:

I had no issues with them but I still had issues authenticating myself with www.amazon.co.uk

Next, I visited the Mozilla Forums and found that I am not the only one unable to login to my Amazon Account with Firefox:

Unfortunately, the recommendations are conflicting but all center around enabling/disabling either OCSP or TLS

These settings can be found by going into Tools > Options > Advanced. On my system TLS 1.0, SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 are all enabled while OCSP is disabled.

For the moment, I have enabled OCSP and I can now login to my amazon.co.uk account but I don't know how other websites needing my login details will behave and I may be forced to change this setting at a later date.