Last evening I checked into a very popular hotel in Bangalore. I was fascinated by the lavish suites and all the jazz.

Soon my fascination for the real world stopped and I wanted to get on to the internet. As soon as I tried to connect to the internet, I got the following error in my browser:

WTF? I don’t have that crap (IE) with me and would never want to install it either.

However I realized that I could trick the server, by setting my browser’s user agent to IE 7.

Just as I was celebrating my smartness, I hit the next roadblock:

Turns out that the 24Online service uses SSL v2 (Secure Sockets Layer 2.0), which of course was deprecated since the collapse of the roman empire.

I could not figure out how to enable this on safari or chrome. Suddenly I remembered, I could go to the about:config tab in Firefox and poke around there.

Tried filtering on security.*ssl2 and to my surprise found a config property called security.enable_ssl2. Tried turning it on. No luck!

Tried enabling the various encryption algorithms for the protocol/certificate:

Yahoo! I was able to move to the next hurdle.

Finally I saw Firefox warning me about accessing the site with a fake certificate. I added the certificate to the exception list and there it was, The WWW. Finally I was connect!

I was just looking through the Google Analytics on my blog, I was surprised to see Firefox dominate the browser usage race. Also surprised to see how fast Google Chrome has penetrated the market. (Over the years, Firefox has got really fat and slow. Chrome’s launch timing was perfect. Just when many geeks could not take FF’s speed and instability anymore.)

Yesterday, my blog had 3,697 visits from 16 different browsers.

And if you see the break up by Operating Systems

This data matches that from w3schools’ Browser Stats, except that my blog is not very IE friendly hence less IE traffic. Also I hope Windows usage goes down…