I have installed firefox on my Centos box (firefox 1.0.7-1.4.1.centos3, just the regular one supplied by centos). At first I had to change the owner of the .mozilla/firefox directory from root to myself in order to run it (which I still think is weird) and after that I ran into the problem that I get refused from tons of websites since SSL is supposedly turned off. I have turned on (actually it is turned on be default but I have verified this) SSL in Edit>Preferences>Advanced (both 2.0 and 3.0). Why do I still get refused?

Is there a specific error message?

Yes it says:

In fact, you can simulate this behavior by turning off SSL security in firefox for a regular firefox installation. However, this abnormal firefox installation says SSL is turned on but I still get turned down by sites that require SSL. I expect it is not turned on, despite firefox claiming it is, but I don't know how to change this.

You cannot connect since SSL is disabled.
(First of all SSL v2 (don't use: weak) should only be used if the server will not accept v3.)
I can only get this message if I turn off SSL v3+2 *and* TLS.
If only TLS is enabled the request will succeed.

If that is not the case, then there is a possibility that the certx.db is corrupted. Close Firefox, rename the file in your profile dir and start Firefox. It should build a new database.

If that doesn't fix things then I'd install Firefox from original tarball to another location and see if that works.

If that doesn't work then I'd check if you're running a proxy that doesn't proxy HTTPS and firewall for outbound block on port TCP/443.

Thanks. Tried taking out the .db file in my directory, but to no avail. Then I decided to delete the entire directory and simply create a new profile. Et voila, works! Still clueless what went wrong the first time, and cannot understand that I didn't try this right away. Thanks for your help!