Products · Pattern or everyday thing
SSL certificates
Raised as a usability problem by 33 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 29 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Self-signed certificate warnings scare normal users and look like malwareUnreviewed
20102026- Browsers forget trusted self-signed certificates, so users must re-verify every visit2025-04-15
- Adding self-signed certs on Windows, Android, and iOS is non-intuitive and a crapshoot for consumers2023-08-17
- Browsers make self-signed certificates hard to accept, and trusting a private CA is a hassle2020-09-21
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 33 complaints
- Devices with manual-only interfaces make certificate renewal and CA trust painful to manage2025-08-26
- EV certificate highlight confused users, so browsers removed it2025-05-23
- Browsers forget trusted self-signed certificates, so users must re-verify every visit2025-04-15
- Adding self-signed certs on Windows, Android, and iOS is non-intuitive and a crapshoot for consumers2023-08-17
- Certificate mechanics feel like a shifting, opaque maze that's hard to understand2023-06-16
- Certificate setup is easy to mess up and can take half an hour to fix2022-05-09
- Browsers de-emphasize EV company info, so people are discouraged from checking it2022-02-17
- Users can't tell whether a verified company name is the right entity2022-02-16
- Browsers make self-signed certificates hard to accept, and trusting a private CA is a hassle2020-09-21
- Users click through scary certificate warnings and learn to ignore them2020-09-11
- Trusting a self-signed certificate is increasingly difficult and counterintuitive, possibly impossible, for users2020-06-28
- Users must dig deep to tell whether an EV certificate's company is genuine2019-09-14
- Hassle dealing with vetting of company documents wastes time and creates a terrible experience2019-09-14
- Getting an EV certificate involves tedious forms, payments, long waits, and poor documentation2019-08-13
- Users can't tell whether a domain belongs to the real company without EV's visible indicator2018-09-18
- Users must already know the legal company name and manually check it on every page2017-12-06
- Self-signed certificate warnings scare normal users and look like malware2017-07-12
- Server-side revocation with CRLs or OCSP is awful to implement2016-01-13
- Client certificate UI for users is pretty bad and hard to use2015-11-19
- Too many confusing certificate options and files; users give up installing HTTPS2015-04-13
- Getting HTTPS working is so cluttered with questions and steps that people give up and use HTTP2015-04-13
- Certificate chain ordering is hard to get right, causing errors on phones2015-01-18
- Users are trained to click through certificate warnings, so they accept fake bank certificates at home2013-11-13
- Browser security warnings for self-signed certs confuse non-technical users, making local TLS hard to deploy2013-08-30
- Client certificate handling is so confusing that even geeks struggle with it2013-07-11
- Client certificate UI is horrendous, so normal users are put off using it2013-07-11
- Client certificates are hard to use and almost impossible to enter from a keyboard2012-09-22
- Users forget certificates exist, lose them on new computers, and cannot get them working2012-03-03
- Certificates couldn't be fully automated, so tellers had to follow printed manual install instructions2012-03-03
- Client certificate sign-in has terrible user experience2011-07-14
- Hard to get SSL set up, and tied to a single IP address2011-06-22
- Very little UX exists to manage certificates and present them per site2011-06-21
- Certificate warning page turns away non-technical users2010-10-26