Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server www.google.com

Question

If I try to navigate to any of the following pages:

• http://google.com/reader
• https://encrypted.google.com/

I get an error message in Safari saying:

Safari can't open the page "https://encrypted.google.com/" because Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server "encrypted.google.com"

I also find that on the Gmail page many images are missing and when I try to go the image location I see the same error as above. Here's a pic of the missing images:

In chrome I have the same issue but with a different error as follows:

Error 107 (net::ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR): SSL protocol error.

I am not using a proxy and this behaviour has started recently for seemingly no apparent reason although I did get a new router about 2 weeks ago. Why am I experiencing these problems?

Answer 1

The issue with certificate trust is one that can break on the server side or the client side. Worse, any intermediate certificate can fail or expire in a chain of trust so it may not be the first certificate you inspect that causes the failure.

In the 2012 case, a temporary mismatch between what Google assumed was a trustworthy certificate chain and what apple has actually shipped caused this. When that gets sorted, you have an excellent chance of secure browsing from the main google entry page and all shipping versions of Safari.

• https://www.google.com

As each “root certificate” expires and as classes of certificates and handshakes are deemed no longer secure, this error will pop up again and either an OS update or server update is needed to fix it. As long as your macOS is getting security updates, you shouldn’t have to load new unexpired root certificates manually for sites as large as google.