437548 - Repeated HTTP authentication password requests on restore-tabs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 348997

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[whiteley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339804 describes bugs about multiple login requests specific to Authenticated Proxy login.  None of the DUPE bugs referred to HTTP Authentication method on actual web-sites.  I'm logging this separately in case there is a different mechanism involved in authentication against web-sites.

Apologies for the time-waste if this is a true DUP of 339804.

When restoring tab-sessions to multiple sites that authenticate with HTTP Authentication method multiple login prompts for the same domain are thrown up.  This behaviour is present in FF3 - beta 3 onward, still present in RC2.  Does not occur on FF2.  

On FF2 the one login prompt is shown and the remaining tabs block loading until the password is entered (or hit enter if fetched from password manager).  In FF3 the requests are processed without blocking on the same password resource, thus you get multiple requests for the same login.

Apologies again: Problem is I can't publish any test URLs that use HTTP Authentication method.  The only sites I know of that use this HTTP authentication are local company intranet sites - most public sites use HTML-forms these days.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Connect to an HTTP Authenticated page - enter your login-details and save them to password manager (to speed things up)
2. Open new tabs to pages within the same HTTP Authentication Realm (or re-use the same page as in 1)
3. Ensure Session restore is on - close firefox
4. Re-open firefox

Actual Results:  
In FF3 - Tabs are reloaded, and the login to your authentication realm is thrown up once per tab.  If you saved the password, hit OK on each of them.

Expected Results:  
In FF2 - Tabs are reloaded - a single login to your authentication realm is thrown up - the other tabs sit their "throbbing".  They are blocked waiting for that response.  Once you hit ok, the other tabs load without request.

You get similar duplication of logins if the sites you authenticate to use frames.  My tab set at work is ~30 tabs with multiple frames.  ouch ;)