Cert spoofing also gets you past issues in dev with self-signed certs etc. Hooking into OpenSSL will leave you with the problems in your browser.

This is particularly handy when the browser hits one of the many, many issues where it won't even make a request; eliminating all of the cert issues at a stroke without modifying the browser is at least a step towards diagnosing the problem.

Although it would be nice if chrome logged why it isn't making those requests.