517734 - multiple master password questions when restoring sessions

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 177175

(SeaMonkey :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Adrian Bunk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090920 SeaMonkey/2.0pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090920 SeaMonkey/2.0pre

When multiple tabs with password protected pages are being restored during session restore, multiple master password questions pop up.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open 2 tabs with password-protected pages
2. close seamonkey
3. start seamonkey
Actual Results:  
two dialogs asking for the master password

Expected Results:  
one dialog asking for the master password

Comment 1

[Adrian Bunk]

Not sure whether blocking or wanted is correct here, but this is very user-visible and annoying (2 tabs were the example, I often have much more tabs with password protected pages open) when you run into it.

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

Not blocking on this, because else we couldn't ship anything at all. The problem is deep down in the code dealing with password prompts, bug 381269 is another example of the same thing, and we can't simply fix it. This sucks, but unless you can come up with a way to fix it, we'll probably need to ship releases with this problem.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

See bug 338549 for a similar problem in mailnews and a start on a solution there, but it's unfortunately huge.

Interestingly, I'd expect Firefox to behave similarly bad in the case you describe here - do you have a copy of Firefox around to try that?

Comment 4

[Adrian Bunk]

(In reply to comment #3)
>...
> Interestingly, I'd expect Firefox to behave similarly bad in the case you
> describe here - do you have a copy of Firefox around to try that?

I tried iceweasel 3.5.3 from Debian experimental, and it is non-buggy in this respect:

With two tabs having the same password-protected page open, I'm getting one window for the Master password, and then one window to confirm the login (the window asking for username+password with the stored information already entered). After that, both tabs load fine.

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

Interesting, this implies that they fixed in some way - Mark, any idea what they did to prevent multiple master password dialogs?

Comment 6

[Adrian Bunk]

I just updated Seamonkey, and now it looks fixed (although in an unexpected way):

First I get one master password dialog, and after entering the Master Password Seamonkey itself starts.

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

This is the workaround for such problems that we added recently as fixing the unserialness of master password dialogs is not trivial to fix right now, the workaround to prompt once at startup wasn't too hard though.

Comment 8

[Herre de Jonge]

I can confirm this behaviour is (In reply to comment #3)
> Interestingly, I'd expect Firefox to behave similarly bad in the case you
> describe here - do you have a copy of Firefox around to try that?

In the current release of FF (3.5.6) this is also the case. I think it
was "introduced" in v3.5.5. (I don't restore so often, but after the
install of 3.5.6 it happened during the restart of FF.)

In my case I restored a few Sharepoint sessions. I do not get 2 master
password dialogs, but many. After entering the password in one and cancelling
the others, I can reload the pages to get them displayed correctly.

The same workaround as for Seamonkey would be appreciated.

Comment 10

[Mike Calmus]

It seesm like this is the same as bug #49923

Comment 11

[Robert Kaiser]

A number of changes regarding those prompts have happened on trunk, please confirm on a current 2.1* build before re-requesting any flag.

Comment 12

[Adrian Bunk]

(In reply to comment #11)
> A number of changes regarding those prompts have happened on trunk, please
> confirm on a current 2.1* build before re-requesting any flag.

2.1 Alpha 1 still has the workaround instead of a proper solution.

Comment 13

[torquil]

I get multiple password prompts when opening many bookmarks at once ("Open all in tabs" option in a bookmark subfolder), if several of the bookmarked pages trigger the password prompt. That's with 3.5.8.

Comment 14

[Greg]

This is an extremely annoying behavior. When Firefox crashes and I had 10 tabs opened that needed passwords, I have to enter the master password over and over and over when my session gets restored.

Can't we just have an option to authenticate when Firefox is launched, and if we hit cancel, don't bother us about it again until Firefox is closed and reopened?

Comment 15

[Vincent Nicolas]

I have found a simple workaround:
enter your master password only once, cancel the other input boxes, and reload the concerned tabs. Not very convenient, but less annoying...

Comment 16

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

yes, I agree it's annoying...