Visualize blue https sites in Firefox 3 in a better way

Firefox 3 introduced a new coloring scheme and design for secure websites. You might remember that Firefox 2 displayed a yellow url bar when the user was accessing a https site. This changed drastically in Firefox 3 which is now displaying blue, yellow and green colors in the favicon area on the left side of the url.

To give you a practical example: If you visit https://www.paypal.com/ you notice a large green bar in the favicon area that is displaying the name of the owner of the website. A visit of https://www.amazon.com/ on the other hand is displaying a smaller blue bar around the favicon. Both are secure websites but one is dominant while the other is barely visible.

This can be changed in Firefox 3 so that the url of the website is displayed in the favicon are as well. To do that type in about:config in the Firefox 3 location bar and filter for the term browser.identity.ssl_domain_display. You can change that term to the following values:

• 0 - the default value.
• 1 - the top level domain is also painted in blue. e.g. ghacks.net
• 2 - all of the domain is painted in blue, e.g. www.ghacks.net

Firefox 3 includes extra UI to convey information about a site’s identity. When a site uses SSL to encrypt communications, the user can choose to have a portion of the site’s URL emphasized in the UI. This preference determines how much of the site’s domain to display to the left of the URL in the Location Bar.

I set mine to the value 2 so that the complete domain name is shown in the favicon area.

Update: These values are still valid, even in the latest Firefox versions. You can edit the value with a double-click on the parameter row.

The default values have changed though. The default value is now set to 1 instead of 0. A value of 1 shows the effective top level domain along with the second level domain.

Update 2: Mozilla recently changed the way secure sites are displayed in the Firefox browser. Included in the change was the removal of the browser.identity.ssl_domain_display parameter. It is no longer available and creating it manually won't have any effect no matter which value you set the parameter to.

An alternative, albeit slightly different in functionality, is Safe for Firefox which highlights secure sites in the browser as well.