Now I know what you’re thinking. What good is a SSL certificate that’s free? In other words, one that you self-sign, use an untrusted certificate authority to sign it, etc. Well crazy as its sounds the first step to widespread free SSL certificates happened a few months ago. The Firefox 3.0 release. Firefox 3.0 included the StartSSL CA root certificate, StartSSL offers a free Class 1 SSL certificate. Equivalent to GoDaddy’s cheapest SSL certificate, i.e. no verification and no customer information in the certificate. Sadly Safari 3.1.2 (really OS X since Safari uses system wide root certificates), and Internet Explorer as of IE 8 Beta 2 do not ship with StartSSL’s root certificate. But at least its a start in the right direction. Hopefully Apple and Microsoft will take a hint from Mozilla and include StartSSL in upcoming releases of their browsers.