Basic authentication + Pinned tabs
Starting with a recent version of Firefox, I've noticed that after I need to restart the browser for updates, it has a hard time loading some of my tabs that require basic authentication. I have a primary (master) password configured to secure my logins, and it properly requests that password on start up. When I provide that password, some of my tabs that prompt me for the basic auth credentials pop up the dialog and everything is fine. However, I have one pinned tab (our Nagios page) that is using basic auth as well, and every time the browser starts up, it just hangs. It never asks for the password, and won't load. If I try to refresh the tab, it just empties the URL bar and continues to hang. I can't use that tab at all to browse anywhere.
I can choose Duplicate Tab from the right click menu to open a copy of the tab (not pinned), and that one will prompt me for the password properly. Eventually have to just close the pinned tab and re-pin and rearrange the new tab to get it back to normal. The next time I have to restart FF, I go through this again. I feel like this started happening once they changed the basic authentication prompt from a separate window to an inline prompt in the tab. I don't remember which version of FF that was introduced in.
I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing something similar, and I can report a bug? Or maybe I am the only one in the whole world that this happens to (possible, I tend to go out of my way to find ways to disable new "features" that are added to FF, sometimes breaking things).
This is on Firefox 91 (but at least 90 also) on Windows 10 Pro 64bit.
All Replies (5)
Just some extra info, I found that setting prompts.modalType.httpAuth to 3 instead of the default 2 forces a window to pop up, requiring you to give attention to that tab and it works properly. I imagine, like all useful about:config settings, this will go away in a future version, so this is likely a temporary solution.
Found that option in this bug report from a while ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1684469
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Modified by Chris Ilias
Did you access this pinned tab to ensure it has been loaded in the previous session as that might be causing this ?
Yes. The first thing I do after I restart the browser is to hold Ctrl+Tab to make sure every tab fully loads and prompts for a password (if needed). I've been doing that for a while, since a FF update sometime in the past disabled the auto loading of restored tabs for memory purposes.
After a little more experimenting, it seems to be the order of the tabs. It loads the last pinned tab, and asked for the password. If I move that pinned tab to the left so a non-authenticated pinned tab is furthest right, both of the authentication tabs exhibit the same behavior mentioned in my original post. It seems like if Firefox doesn't immediately try to display the page on start up, it will get into this weird state.
And finally, I just figured out if I close the "broken" tab and then hit Ctrl+Shift+T to undo the closure, it will prompt for password and loads properly. I guess that will be my new workaround for now, since it's quicker than duplicating and re-pinning.
Modified by J3rk
J3rk said
The first thing I do after I restart the browser is to hold Ctrl+Tab to make sure every tab fully loads and prompts for a password (if needed). I've been doing that for a while, since a FF update sometime in the past disabled the auto loading of restored tabs for memory purposes.
Pinned tabs should restore from cache automatically, normal tabs "on demand". These are the relevant preferences:
- browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand - for regular tabs, default is true
- browser.sessionstore.restore_pinned_tabs_on_demand - default is false
However, I don't know whether that will trigger a password prompt.
Thanks jscher. You are correct that it automatically loads the pinned tabs, but not the regular ones. I've now toggled that setting so it will load all of my tabs on start up. I normally only keep 5-10 standard tabs open, so I'm not too worried about memory issues with loading them all every time.