How to debug Safari silently failing to connect to a secure WebSocket

Question

When doing new WebSocket(\'ws://server/\'); Safari connects fine, but when using new WebSocket(\'wss://server/\'); it completely fails (returns a <

Answer 1

Where I've seen this, it means there is something wrong with the certificate (expired, incorrect domain, etc). Try connecting directly to the WebSockets server from Safari, i.e. https://wss_server:wss_port/. Safari should give you a better error message that way.

When I had this problem while developing wsproxy as part of noVNC (HTML5 VNC client) it turned out I was using an IP for the server but the certificate was signed for a hostname.

Answer 2

Sysadmin fiddling has revealed a fix: setting OpenSSL to SSLv3 by default kills Safari, but letting it pick its own SSL version (all) works fine.