I have a page that is viewed secured with 'https' in the URL, that also contains youtube urls to play video from youtube. Since the youtube URL contains 'http' with no 's' IE is giving an a warning dialog of "This page contains both secure and non-secure Items."

Is there a way I can workaround this in Javascript? Maybe after the page loads generate the youtube player HTML with a function? The url will still have to begin with 'http://'

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the input so far! I know this sounds impossible. I'd be happy if there was some conditional comment or something so I can tell IE to suppress this dialog box. It confuses our customer since most of the world is in IE, FF has much better behavior in that it tells you if you click the broken lock, but not an annoying popoup. This is like a new version of "your program has performed an illegal operation." (user hides from police) I am embedding youtube video onto the page where the src is from youtube. I am using their player, as it is hosted by them. No way out of this that I see.

I guess my fix is to only apply HTTPS to the very sensitive pages (password change, login) and come out of it in all others so youtube videos don't give this popup. I am in PHP and am worried the SESSION will get clobbered if I do this but I guess it is the only way around and will wait to tackle that bear monday.

I have a page that is viewed secured with 'https' in the URL, that also contains youtube urls to play video from youtube. Since the youtube URL contains 'http' with no 's' IE is giving an a warning dialog of "This page contains both secure and non-secure Items."

Is there a way I can workaround this in Javascript? Maybe after the page loads generate the youtube player HTML with a function? The url will still have to begin with 'http://'

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the input so far! I know this sounds impossible. I'd be happy if there was some conditional comment or something so I can tell IE to suppress this dialog box. It confuses our customer since most of the world is in IE, FF has much better behavior in that it tells you if you click the broken lock, but not an annoying popoup. This is like a new version of "your program has performed an illegal operation." (user hides from police) I am embedding youtube video onto the page where the src is from youtube. I am using their player, as it is hosted by them. No way out of this that I see.

I guess my fix is to only apply HTTPS to the very sensitive pages (password change, login) and come out of it in all others so youtube videos don't give this popup. I am in PHP and am worried the SESSION will get clobbered if I do this but I guess it is the only way around and will wait to tackle that bear monday.

• javascript
• php
• internet-explorer
• https

• best of luck, I've only been able to do this by changing the security settings to suppress the dialog. – scunliffe Commented Feb 6, 2009 at 20:37
• 1 Nooo... You don't really want to suppress the dialog, do you? I'm a firm believer that the blade cover on that table saw is really there for your protection, no matter how annoying it can be... ;-) – Dscoduc Commented Feb 6, 2009 at 22:03

10 Answers 10

One thing I've done to work around this problem is to create a page on my SSL site that proxies in the 3rd party resource. That way the client only sees SSL URLs.

For example, you flash player could point to the URL "https://YourSite.com/proxy.aspx?URL=http://www.youtube.com/video.swf". When "proxy.aspx" is called, it would make a new web request to the URL in the query string and return the data to the client.

If you do this you need to validate the proxied URL or use some kind ID so that the URL can not be changed since you are convincing the browser that this content is trusted.

I've worked around this problem on all browsers using the following:

1) Create a thumbnail image of the start of the video with the "Play image" tag on the snapshot and host the image on your own https server. Embed the thumbnail where you want the video to be.

2) When the user clicks on the image invoke a Javascript onclick handler to create a new window with the href of the http embedded youtube video.

function onImgClickHandler() {
  //Link to embedded Viddler or Youtube video
  var win = window.open("http://www.viddler.com/player/###/", "My Video",
    'height=500,width=800,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes');
  win.focus();
}

3) The video will now appear in a popup of the main page.

I usually use videos as tutorials for my site, so having the video in a popup browser window works well because it can be viewed alongside the main content and lets the user follow along with the site. The browsers do not even give a redirect warning that you are invoking an http popup from an https site, so your users will not see any "scary" non-secure item warnings on any browsers.

Hope this helps, I have an example of the above on the landing page of my site: https://drchrono.com/

UPDATE: I made the image preview by taking a screenshot of the playing video.

According to this quite recent YouTube API blog post, embedded YouTube videos already support access via HTTPS. If this is the case, (and I haven't tested it, but equally I have no reason to not believe them), then you should just be able to stick the "s" into your embed URL and it will work just fine.

If there was a way around it would be a security flaw in IE and Microsoft would patch it, so I don't think you're going to get away with mixed content and no warning.

The only alternative is to host the FLVs yourself. There are a number of good SWF based FLV players available.

Having insecure links on a secure web page is an issue that has little workaround. One option is to exclude specific content on your page when a user connects via https. In this way a non-secure page load would display the content and a secure page load would not display the content:

<% if (!Request.IsSecureConnection){ %>
    <div>You can't see this if the page is secure<div>
<%} %>

I have used this method with much success... Hope this helps.

I have had this same problem and found a solution.

It works without having to turn of SSL certification.

Step by step guide to fix Google chrome

You can view the fixed page listed below. It has links to YouTube,Flickr and many other websites. It is secure and has been for a few months now. Hope it helps you too.

The mod_rewrite module of the Apache httpd server can be used to embed YouTube videos on SSL secure pages without any errors, as detailed on Adam Mershon's blog.

It involves setting up a rewrite rule to redirect a path within the SSL domain to non-SSL YouTube:

.htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^youtube/(.*)$ http://www.youtube.com/$1 [L]

So that inside your HTML you can embed YouTube link URLs appearing to be from your own domain, such as:

<embed src="https://www.yourdomain.com/youtube/v/mydjFYoD4WS&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&autoplay=1&"
       type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
       allowscriptaccess="always"
       allowfullscreen="true"
       width="560"
       height="340">
</embed>

Using Javascript to replace the URL does not work. IE7 intercepts the content, and thereafter, the warning.

I tried using (jQuery) $(function() { }); it sortof works. You can click yes/no to the dialog, the content will load nonetheless.

This is a severe problem in my world. It earns my work comments from users like "It's not user-friendly", "It's broken" or "It killed my kitten".

The proxy solution probably is the only pseudo-fix that's gonna roll. Just that it's clearly not a perfect solution either.

I try to navigate this a bit better by running as much of my sites on https as I can. Obviously the youtube case isn't fixed by that.

IE, what a silly hunk of FUD-pushing abominationware. I hope IE9 really is as vastly better as it seems. Just, not supporting XP means, well, it's sort of like it was never released. As the n00biest of users, will unwittingly write-protect the status quo until the XP-powered Chineese Skynet of 2247 finally feeds us the red pill...

Your problem occurs become the main page is grabbed using Https whilst one or more included files ( images, javascript, css etc ) is fetched using http. Fix the http url to be https.