Web site security certificate issues vs. browsers

[MR ZenWiz]

I just had an interesting two days at work unable to view my gmail due
to certificate problems.  I bring this up here because the same
problems do not occur on my Windows laptop.

On my desktop, which is Xubuntu 12.04, I routine ran into "untrusted
certificate" issues whenever I was trying to access any of the secure
Google sites, including gmail.  In Chrome, this is fatal because for
whatever reason, Chrome does not allow the user to override such
concerns (/they/ know better than the users...).  Firefox (and
SeaMonkey) however both allow this to be overridden.

However, it seems that there is a limit to the number of times one can
do this override, then they all fail.  The only way I was able to get
past this was to rename my ~/,mozilla directory and restart the
browsers.  (Even then Seamonkey acts funny but WTH).

Does anyone know a way to influence this other than a config file redo?

Does anyone know a way around this untrusted certificate problem in
Chrome at all?  (Yes, I checked Google's groups and there are at least
three postings about this problem, all unanswered.)

I just can't see why Linux should be harder to use for this (or
anything, really) than Windows....

Thanks.

MR