330160 - HTTP auth dialog should only be modal for the target tab, but not block the whole window (usability)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 123913

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[maenneph]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060126 SUSE/1.5.0.1-5.1 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060126 SUSE/1.5.0.1-5.1 Firefox/1.5.0.1

When accessing a website which requires HTTP basic authentification, the password prompt is shown as a modal dialog which blocks any other operations on the browser window. This causes bad usability because a user might encounter a HTTP auth prompt for which she does not remember the login information and might want to look it up in parallel in another tab. It would therefore be better to only lock the affected tab while the dialog is shown.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have at least one tab open
2. open a website which requires HTTP auth in a new tab (e.g. http://www.w3.org/Member/)
3. Attempt to navigate back to the other tab while the auth dialog is shown

Actual Results:  
Normal browser navigation is impossible due to modal auth dialog.

Expected Results:  
The auth dialog blocks only operations to the originating tab until fully processed, but does allow normal operation on the other tabs in the meantime.

Just consider the following use case: Some user is unexpectedly confronted with a HTTP auth dialog but knows that she has the login information stored somewhere in her webmail-account. So the natural thing to do would be to open a new tab and search the webmail-account for the login data and possibly copy the hard-to-remember default password from the e-mail over to the HTTP auth dialog. But this isn't possible because everything's locked. So the user has to click cancel in the dialog, which brings her to the auth error page in this tab, then open a new tab and do the research, then come back to the auth tab, hit back, click the password-protected link again and then finally login. 

It would be great if the AUTH dialog sticks to the tab it was coming from and leaves the other ones alone. (Unfortunately, this would IMHO require quite some re-design and coding effort). Back in the days of multiple browser windows this was not really an issue, but nowadays, where tab navigation is pretty much state-of-the-art, I've already seen several people being puzzled by the fact that they can't navigate their tabs when encountering such an AUTH dialog.

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of Core bug 223687 -> Core bug 123913?

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 123913 ***