242229 - Asked for http authentication when fetching facicon.ico

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 133755

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Travis Pettijohn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

https://nsp2004.stage.ds.uiuc.edu:677/Colleges/ DOES NOT have any HTTP auth. The
root of the web (/) DOES require HTTP authentication. When you hit the web page,
it asks you to authenticate. I checked the server logs, and the /Colleges/
application loads WITH NO auth, but the request for /favicon.ico was authenticated.

This bug might be even more annoying if there were different credentials
required for / than there were for the subfolder. I suspect (though I haven't
tested) that you would be asked to authenticate twice. The user would be very
confused as to why he was being asked to authenticate again.

In my opinion, the request for favicon should just fail. I shouldn't be asked to
authenticate IF THE ONLY REASON for the authentication is for /favicon.ico. 



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure you don't have any cached http credentials (might require a browser
restart). 
2. Hit a subfolder on a web site where that subfolder does not require http
auth, but the root of the web does. 


Actual Results:  
You will be asked to authenticate. When you look at server logs, you'll see that
the auth is for favicon.ico.

Expected Results:  
If fetching /favicon.ico requires authentication and no authentication has been
requested from the user already, don't ask the user for auth (just fail). If
authentication has already been requested from the user, try it ONCE. DO NOT ask
for auth from the user a second time. If it fails, give up.

This is kind of a little bug...one of those bugs you save for the real
polishing. I admit it's a rare situation that this would occur. BUT...Internet
Explorer doesn't ask you to authenticate (does what I would expect).

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 133755 ***

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2] (away July 24th - August 16th)]

v.