It's a strange technique.
It's a strange technique.
The way it's meant to work, the server can specify which certificate authorities it accepts client certs from, and your browser will only prompt you to pick a cert if you have one loaded from one of those CAs - if you don't, you won't even know the server's asking; in practice, some browsers will show the dialog in any case. ISTR some versions of Safari act like that.
(I ran into that at work - we were setting up a web API authenticated with TLS client certs, and started getting bug reports from (largely non-technical) users, completely befuddled by these dialogs that had started popping up for them on our human-facing domains; we ended up provisioning a dedicated IP just for the API to work around it.)