Secure Connection Failed - Only at NEWSMAX

While visiting NEWSMAX.com, after viewing from 2 to 8 articles I will get a "Secure Connection Failed" with no reason given. This happens with Firefox (my normal browser) and with Edge. This began a couple months ago. I'm running Win 11 23H2 22631.4317 with Firefox 131.0.3

When the failure occurs, clicking the lock and then "Clear cookies and site data..." fixes the problem - but it occurs again after another few articles are viewed. In Firefox I have tried disabling DNS over HTTPS and security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling -- neither helped.

The Reliability Monitor doesn't show anything. I tried Event Viewer but don't know what to look for there - nothing seemed to be logged at the time of the errors.

This problem doesn't occur on any site except NEWSMAX. I saw the same complaint on 10 Forum with no resolution.... Solutions found on the net generally assume that a reason for the "Secure Connection Failed" is provided or that the problem occurs when attempting to establish the initial connection - neither of which is the case with NEWSMAX.

Any help in sorting this out would be appreciated.

Know this is just a guess here, but I think one of the Newsmax links is pointing to a non-secure link. When a website that requires a secure (https) connection tries to communicate with your computer, the browser cross-checks this attempt to make sure that the website certificate and the connection method are actually secure. If either does not match, the connection will fail. As far I know there's no way around this. It's up to the owner of the link you are attempting to connect to to either make their site a secure site OR establish a valid security certificate (depending on for which reason (or both) its site won't connect through modern browsers)

In this day and time, personally I wouldn't want it any other way.

I've noticed that with newsmax too. If you run firefox in troubleshoot mode (help>troubleshoot mode) it doesn't appear to happen. At least with me it doesn't and i'm using the same version as you. I have lots of add\popup blocker extensions, which may be the cause, but I'm not changing that for one site.

Per @fishingfool's suggestion I checked add-ons I'm using for both FireFox and Edge since the same problem occurs with both browsers. UBlockOrigin was the only add-on common to both so I disabled it on NEWSMAX and have not had a problem since - will take a couple days to be certain but it seems to be fixed.

Thanks for the quick response.

I have EXACTLY the same issue as the OP @GadgetBuilder No other site gives me this issue.
I run PC Matic as well as "Privacy Badger" and that is the only ad blocking add on. I don't run Edge but do occasionally run Waterfox.

I would think there is some setting in Firefox that would exempt or allow Newsmax to load and stay loaded without issues.

I click on the security bar in the address and clear cookies and site data and all is well.... for a while.

Any ideas on a work around?

Have you tried disabling all your add-ons using Troubleshooting mode as suggested by @fishingfool ?
If the problem doesn't occur with all add-ons disabled then turning half of the remaining disabled add-ons at a time (sort of a binary search) should locate the offender quickly. I found that UBlockOrigin caused the issue in my case so enabling the ad blockers first might be a good strategy.
If it is an ad blocker problem you may be able to white-list NEWSMAX. That's what i did with UBlockOrigin and it has worked fine ever since on NEWSMAX -- which has few ads.

Three links were found in the website's source code of the home page/first page are non-secured links which goes against https:// recommendations that were commonplace in 2018.

If there are three on the home page, you can likely bet there are more the deeper into the site you go.

Same here after about 10 articles. Happened after I clicked the back button.
NewsMax needs to be made aware of this issue

I used Firefox to contact them and linked back to this site describing the problem. Perhaps everyone should do this as a courtesy.

I never use that Newsmax website, I only visited after reading the posts here because I was curious of the issue.

Those kinds of mistakes seem lazy and careless to me. Especially given the push over 7 years ago (or more) to use secured https:// instead of http:// which Google was adamantly promoting webmasters to use for security and very importantly, end-user safety & security.

I agree with the above posters. Only NEWSMAX seems to have this issues in all the sites I visit or refresh in TABS at the top.
I have written to them about this but maybe we need to keep prodding them on this.

In the meantime, it would seem you could go into SETTINGS in Firefox or Waterfox and tell the browser to "ignore" the site issues of NEWSMAX without having to clear site data and cookies all the time to get it to work.
Whether I have PC Matic enable, or disabled for this site make no difference. NO OTHER SITES have this same issue, and probably because of what @PCUser above has said.
AND it's not recent as if you do a search you see issues happening several moths ago..

It seems to be that not all links are redirected to https automatically, thus triggering the ad blockers. @GadgetBuilder go into Ublock and add
to allowed/whitelist and relaunch the browser and it shouldn’t happen anymore.

For security reasons, it's my opinion that no one should LOWER their security for a website that clearly has security browser warnings and/or issues.
If the website is lax on the home page with something that should have been corrected 7 years ago, there is a higher likelihood that there could be something else compromised.

I do not recommend ever lowering your security for any website. This is how bad things happen to end users. If multiple people know of a vulnerability, it is likely a known TARGET by others including malicious actors. This would then be an opportunity for a malicious actor to try to exploit the unencrypted, non-secure website.