If you like to save your passwords, you probably know that its a pain to save Basic Authentication passwords in Firefox. Basic Authentication comes up in a new window saying “Enter username and password for …” and looks like this:

Prompt

There is no ’save this password’ button. If you access this site every day, and close Firefox between sessions, you’d have to type your username/password every time. No longer!

It is possible, though seemingly undocumented, to save the username/password inside the HTTP URL (this long has been done with FTP). For example:

http://user:password@layer2.org

bookmark

Just put this into a bookmark, and you have an easy way to access your password-protected site. Of course, if the password is actually sensitive, you might think twice about saving it in plain text as a bookmark!

The only annoying thing that happens using this method is that you’ll see this prompt the first time you try to log in (for any given Firefox session):

Log in

Just press OK. While not perfect, this is a heck of a lot easier to deal with than entering the password each and every time.

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