513408 - need way to observe the result of an attempted network authentication

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect, P3)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Bug 223636 would like to implement automatic login for HTTP auth. Instead of making the user click "Ok" to a login prompt (with the credentials already filled in by Login Manager), the login manager would just skip the prompting step and submit the credentials automatically.

One potential problem with this is that if the authentication fails (eg, your password has expired), we could get stuck in a loop submitting the same bad login over and over at a high rate.

Last time I looked into it, there didn't seem to be an obvious way for login manager to determine what happens after it sends the request on its way... Ideally it could register an observer/listener with the channel (or globally?), and receive notifications when authentications fail. It could then use this to disable automatic login for the failed login (thus breaking any loop).

Notifications of successful logins could also be useful, since right now we offer to save the login immediately after submission and rely on removing all save-login notifications when the failure triggers another prompt... In between is a window of opportunity where the user might save a bad login.

Comment 1

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258