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[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Sent to you by Tom Hoffman via Google Reader: HTTP Basic Auth problems
that affect Zope (2 and 3) in Safari 5.1, Mac OS X Lion via Griddle
Noise by Jeff Shell on 9/6/11

One very frustrating experience that I encountered after upgrading to
OS X Lion (10.7) was that Safari 5.1, as included in Lion, would
constantly pop up basic-authentication dialog boxes on our CMS sites,
which are based on the Zope Toolkit (kind of between Zope 3.4 and
Bluebream). Just about every page in our admin UI would do this. To get
around this, I switched to Firefox for interacting with our admin
screens, but still used Safari as my primary browser (better OS X
citizen, takes advantage of Lion features which I enjoy, bookmark
syncing, etc). This lead to problems as Firefox could get pushed way
back in the usage stack and would be paged out, and it did NOT like to
wake up after long periods of inactivity.

A couple of days ago I decided to take another look at the WebKit
project as I was certain that I was not the only person having this
issue. And I found a bug that had been recently closed relating to this
issue. It's WebKit bug 66354 and it's resolution is in the WebKit
nightly builds since at least September 2, 2011.

Apparently this only affects OS X Lion as it has to do with low level
CFNetwork changes in Lion. The bug occurs not with basic auth, exactly,
as I was able to use other systems behind basic auth. The bug occurs
when there are redirects with Basic Auth, which our CMS uses a fair bit
in its admins for basic navigation links.

As of OS X 10.7.1 and its Safari (Version 5.1 (7534.48.3)) this is
broken. If you use OS X Lion and Safari and encounter HTTP Basic Auth
problems, I'd recommend switching to the nightly builds.

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