Spent the last weekend fighting to get firefox to connect to a sharepoint portal hosting my homegrown TFS instance's TFS/WEB and team project portal from a friends' place. Firefox is THE favourite browser and I was hating to se it fail miserably with NTLM authentication.

Fun part is it showed the login prompt accepted credentials and like a pestering young puppy came back for the same credentials. After banging my head and various "I don't know what I don't know" attempts I decided to play god and entered the firefox's advance config mode. And voila! there sits a nifty little option called network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris. Assign your URI to it and you are through.

No more shameface before those Chrome/Opera users. :).

To enter FireFox's god mode, open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar. There is a search box which certainly comes handy shifting through hundreds of options.

The root lies in firefox's default mechanism of not allowing NTLM passthrough authentication. Firefox defaults to digest credentials which are blatantly refused by a web app expecting NTLM which results in authentication failure and Firefox keeps asking for credentials over and over again.

The steps listed above are same as adding a website to your trusted sites' list in Internet Explorer.