Posts Tagged ‘error’

* Internet Explorer: this page contains both secure and nonsecure items

Posted on April 23rd, 2009 by whinger. Filed under Tech, Web Development.


So the web is full of people asking about this symptom and I hit it myself. Seemingly randomly (but consistently) IE will complain about nonsecure items in the page, with this warning message:

 

This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. \n\nDo you want to display the nonsecure items?

The error message from IE7

The usual response to this is that you’re loading images (or other media) from a non-SSL connection (hence “non-secure” items); there are also some mentions of IE not being happy about IFRAMEs without SRC= attributes (the browser assigns “about:blank” as a default SRC, which – being non-secure – flips the error); however none of these things applied in my case.

 

I discovered that if I turned off javascript the error disappeared, which suggested my script was problematic, but I still couldn’t find anything in the scripts which was loading any non-secure items.

 

In the end after much messing around it turns out that the offending script was setting object.style.background to a relative path, eg 

myObj.style.background=”url(/images/mybackground.gif)”;

Even though this will correctly resolve to an https:// address (assuming the root of the document is https://) IE can’t figure this out and moans.

 

Simply adding the full path to the background solved my problem.

 

This doesn’t apply to CSS files setting backgrounds – you can happily have relative paths in these and all will be well. 

 

Of course I then wondered why I hadn’t found that on the web and figured you might be looking for it too – so here it is 🙂

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