Question

I develop a Chrome plugin that uses XMLHttpRequest to send a GET HTTP request with an username/password to a basic-auth-protected URL, so that it can then “auto-login” to it afterwards (since Chrome caches credentials for HTTP basic-auth).

Here’s the code I use:

  var xml = new XMLHttpRequest();
  xml.open('GET',<url>,false,<username>,<password>)
  xml.send('');

It used to work fine for quite a while, but started failing some time ago. The plugin code hasn’t changed, so I thought it could have to do with Chrome itself. I downloaded a previous version for OSX (17) and BAM, it worked again.

After some additional research, I found out that it might have to do with Chrome 19 not supporting the username:pwd@url syntax for authenticating to basic-auth protected URLs, because when I send the XMLHttpRequest, I see this in Google Chrome’s js console:

GET http://user:[e-mail] 401 (Unauthorized)

Does anyone know whether it’s a bug or if Chrome stopped supporting this feature?

Thanks,

Marcelo.

Answer 1

You are not the only person having this issue. It’s ruffled several other people’s feathers.

However, given the comments from the Chromium Developers:

The support for embedded auth in URLs was intentionally deprecated.

It looks like it was removed intentionally.