66177 - Auth dialog should be prefilled with username when using http://[e-mail]

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement)

Description

[Mirek Hankus]

Netscape 4.x has a good feature which is missing in Mozilla. When you enter url 
like http://[e-mail], and  host requires authentication
password dialog appears. In Netscape 4.x this dialog had already username filled
in, all yiou had to do was to enter password. This was very usefull when such
url was stored in bookmarks. But now you must reenter username and password.

Comment 1

[Henrik Gemal]

must be networking, right?

Comment 2

[neeti]

Changing component to HTTP

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 114254 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 139851 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Bill McGonigle (not currently reading bugmail; please contact directly)]

In the dup bug I filed, bug 139851, I suggested this should happen for FTP also.
 I notice this bug is under Networking::HTTP.  Would the work done in
Networking::HTTP get us FTP support too?

Comment 6

[Darin Fisher]

nope, this bug would have to be solved individually for FTP.

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 166649 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 196090 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 202544 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Moshe Yudkowsky]

Rather than open a new bug, and based on comments I've seen in other bugs, this
is the "base bug."

Usernames and Passwords are not properly transmitted by Mozilla if the URL
contains a cgi query. I have seen this in 1.4 (on Windows 2000 and Linux) and
now 1.5 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031024
Debian/1.5-2). AFAICT, Mozilla is not remembering the username:password pair and
retransmitting.

Procedure:

1. Go to site that requires authentication, and use username/password in URL:

http://username:[e-mail]/needs_auth/some_page.html

2. The attempt to get some_page.html will be successful.

3. Attempt to click on link on some_page.html. This will work.

4. Attempt to click on a page with a CGI URL that ends in the form "cgi?data". I
get a dialogue box asking for the username/password.

I postulate some wacky interaction  between the CGI query form of the URL and
the "get username/password and send it again" section of the code.

Comment 11

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

There are two problematic areas here:
1. Necko doesn't remember the username. The code is at
http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?file=mozilla/netwerk/protocol/http/src/nsHttpChannel.cpp&rev=1.213#2227
It clears the authentry if it couldn't log on with it. By doing that, it forgets
the username. so it doesn't hand the username to the promt

2. wallet tries to get the username + password from the saved data. After doing
that, i copies over the username strings even if there was no stored username.
So, the username won't appear in the dialog.
http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?file=mozilla/extensions/wallet/src/singsign.cpp&rev=1.245#2712

Comment 12

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

(In reply to comment #11)
> There are two problematic areas here:

isn't the main problem that nsIAuthPrompt has no way to pass in a username to
fill into the dialog?

Comment 13

[Ken Johanson]

I took a gander at the source for the Necko/Moz API a couple years back trying to figure out a solution... it indeed seemed to be an overwhelming task to figure it out -- this feature (pre-filling the username) (standard syntax and behavor in other agents) seems so simple after all..

The orginal authors would probably do 2-10 time better figuring this out than I (or most outsiders?)... have they moved on to other things, or?

Comment 14

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

bug 265780, which this bug depends on, will make this pretty easy, I believe.

Comment 15

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Firefox no longer prompts for the user and password if you pass them on the URL, it just asks for confirmation, and has been like this for a while.