Learn something new every day - Clear SSL state

I have known for years, as have most Windows OS users, that sometimes Internet Explorer caches data and refuses to let it go. This is especially frustrating when you're trying to test changes to a web site, and you keep getting the old version. Sometimes CTRL-F5 will force a reload, but sometimes you have to go into settings and manually clear your cache and cookies.

Well, I ran across something new this morning. We have an application that makes an SSL connection to a server. That connection was failing. We could ping the target server, run a trace route to it, all of that, so it wasn't a general network failure. However, whenever the application tried to connect, we were getting an error that said "SendSSLMessageBlocking error 12057".

A quick call to the vendor indicated that it was an SSL certificate issue of some sort. They had us uncheck “Check for server certificate revocation*” in the Advanced settings, yet that didn't fix the problem.

Well, Google to the rescue, as usual!!

I ran across this post on Google Groups about an issue with GMail Notifier throwing the same error.

Did you know that Internet Explorer/Windows also has an SSL certificate cache? And that it can get corrupted?

After a quick click of the "Clear SSL state" button on the Content tab and a restart of the service that was failing, everything is back up and running now.

It's a good day if you learn something new.

IE9 Platform Preview Released

Microsoft has released the first Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9.  Basically, the Platform Preview is not even alpha code.  It's intended for developers only, not end users.  In fact, most of the GUI features are not implemented (there's no address bar, no back button, no tab support, etc).  Microsoft wants developers to use it on their sites, and then provide feedback on how well the render and javascript engines are performing.  Updates are currently planned on an 8 week cycle.

From a standards and performance point of view, there are several interesting things about IE9.  It uses a new scripting engine called Chakra, that is considerably faster than the IE8 engine.  In fact, Microsoft claims that it is faster than Firefox, but still slower than Chrome and Opera.  One of the things Chakra does is compile any javascript on a page to native code instead of running it in interpreted mode.  Also, they've finally decided to adopt support for HTML5, including Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).  It appears this will finally kill off VML, which has been dead since 1998 but still included in IE.

IE9 will also off-load a lot of the graphical processing to the GPU.  They can apparently leverage the Vista/Windows 7 graphics sub-system, and thus the GPU, to achieve much better performance for multimedia support.  Oh, and it also includes native support for multiple cores.  For instance, Chakra will background compile script code on a separate thread and core from the main IE9 process.

Naturally, no discussion in the article about security holes or patches, or anything they've done to make it more robust in that regard.