How to Get SSL Certificate Info in Safari on Mac
The latest versions of Safari for Mac have changed how a person might find SSL certificate information for a particular website, something that is commonly needed in web development, information security, and developmental web work in general. While in prior versions of Safari you could simply click on the little padlock icon next to the domain name in the address bar, Apple seems to have removed that padlock icon, thereby removing that as an easy way to get SSL certificate details for any domain.
If you work in web development, information security, web work, hosting, IT, tech support, devops, systems administration, or any number of other technical fields that rely on functioning SSL certificates and verifying them, you might want to know how to find and view the full SSL certificate information details in modern versions of Safari for Mac, and that’s what we’ll show you here.
How to Find SSL Certificate Details in Safari for Mac
If you’re running Safari 18.4 or later (or MacOS Sequoia 15.4 or later), here is how you can retrieve SSL certificate information and details within Safari:
- Open Safari if you haven’t done so already and navigate to the domain URL you wish to check the SSL certificate info for
- Pull down the “Safari” menu, and choose “Connection Security Details…”
- Now click on “Show Certificate” to see additional information about the SSL certificate for that domain
- You can expand further SSL cert information by clicking on the microscopic faint grey arrow next to “Trust” and “Details”
There you go, now you can see the full SSL certificate details just like before, but with an added step from a menu instead of an easy click on a padlock icon that no longer exists next to the domain name.
Apple considers this a “New Feature”, describing it in the release notes for Safari 18.4 as “Added the ability to view certificate detail from Page Menu > more > Connection Security Details on iOS, iPadOS, and in visionOS, or Safari > Connection Security Details… on macOS. (139300381)”, but for many web developers and workers this may be a little frustrating since it changes the way something has worked for a very long time prior. As you can tell from that release note mention, the change also applies to Safari for iPhone and iPad, where it’s even more buried, though we’re obviously focusing on the Mac in this particular article.
Cheers to derflounder for noticing this change and pointing it out to a wider audience.
Do you think this is an improvement to showing SSL certificate details, or is this a step back? Perhaps Apple made the change since the majority of Safari users are likely not engaging in web development or security work, so the padlock was causing more grief to average users than convenience? Who knows, but whether or not you like the change will need to be pushed aside because it’s already implemented, and now it’s merely a matter of working with the new.
