490851 - Multiple password popus for the same host

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 339804

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[dirtside]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030422 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030422 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.7

If I browse to a page that contains multiple image links, and the image URLs require HTTP auth, Firefox pops up a separate login/password popup for each one, even though they are all for the same host, and Firefox has already pre-filled the same (correct) login and password for each one.  So I end up having to click OK twenty or thirty times before I can use the page.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an HTML page that contains multiple <img> tags, each linking to the same host (but different URL paths, e.g.

<img src='http://example.com/img1.gif'><br>
<img src='http://example.com/img2.gif'><br>
<img src='http://example.com/img3.gif'><br>

2. Set up example.com so that it requires basic HTTP auth for all requests.

3. View the HTML page.  Firefox will open up one popup for each image URL in the page.  The popups will be stacked atop each other.  (If Firefox has saved the login and password for that host, the username and password fields will be prefilled.  Otherwise, they will be empty.)

Every one of the popups has to be handled individually.
Actual Results:  
Three username/password popups appeared.

Expected Results:  
Only one username/password popup should appear; Firefox should be smart enough to figure out that they're all from the same host, and only require the U/P once.

Comment 1

[dirtside]

Just to clarify why this is such a problem: I work on a site that frequently contains hundreds of images on a separate host from the page they're linked on.  Having 100+ popups appear when I first visit such a page makes FF3 very hard to use, as there's no obvious way to get rid of the popups aside from tediously clicking through each one.

The simplest solution I can think of is to have only one popup appear per host.  When it goes to create a new popup, it could check which ones are already active, and instead attach the output of the existing one to the new one, or something.

A more UI-friendly solution might be to have a sidebar (like bookmarks) slide into being, with an ordered list of every auth that's being asked for.  We have a few situations where there are resources from multiple hosts embedded on the same page, and it'd be nice to be able to see all the auth requests being made at once.  I realize this is blue-sky but it's just a suggestion :)