Michael Knopf

turning concepts into working products...

Integrated Windows Authentication: Getting FireFox to Play Nice
Author: Michael Knopf
Published: Thursday, September 23, 2010
Last Updated: Friday, September 24, 2010

If you protect your web applications using Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA), typical with company Intranets (like here at NASA), FireFox will prompt users to provide their network credentials (i.e. their Username and Password) when they try to access the site. 

You can side step this by making minor changes to FireFox so that it will negotiate with the web server behind the scenes, effectively performing a "silent login" like Internet Explorer does automatically when accessing IWA protected apps.


IMPORTANT: Your IIS node needs to allow fall back to NTLM Authentication for this to work.

Using the Metabase Manager, part of the IIS Resource Toolkit that is available from Microsoft, will show Negotiate, NTLM under Authentication. If you removed NTLM than this tutorial is a waste of your time

Step 1:

Open FireFox, in the Address Bar type about:config, you will be prompted with a warning like the following.



Step 2:

Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button. In the “Filter” textbox type network.automatic



Step 3:

Select the 2nd option named network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris. Enter the values of your Intranet sites, separating them with a comma, and click OK


FireFox will then negotiate your login silently, eliminating the need for the Server Login prompt.




What Others Are Saying: