02.06.07

Authenticate at will

Posted in Camino, Life at 1:25 am by Smokey

Tonight bug 282250 - Add negotiateauth support landed. This marks the first time that I’ve added a new feature to Camino. Granted it’s really just a build-config change, so there’s not the same satisfaction that comes from hours of work and dozens of lines of code, but it is the first time I’ve done something that is not a fix for something that is broken or an incremental improvement to an existing feature, so I get a good deal of satisfaction from it. (And hey, until I learn to code in something other than AppleScript, it’s the closest I’ll get to that “hours of work and dozens of lines of code” thing, anyway.)

Even if it was only a few lines of changes and a few hours (mostly waiting for four trees to rebuild :P ) of work, the patch was my most significant code contribution to Camino thus far. Moreover, this advanced authentication support will make lives easier for Camino users in research labs and other managed environments. Without this feature, Camino really was not an option for this set of (would-be) Camino users; instead they had to use Firefox or Safari when using their intranet websites. We can’t (and won’t) always make everyone happy, but there is no reason to concede those users to other browsers over something that is already a “standard” part of Gecko, and from today on (including the forthcoming Camino 1.1b1 and Camino 1.1 releases), we won’t :)

Special thanks to the Camino-using gang out in New Mexico for testing the builds as quickly as I got them up to ensure things worked properly…go forth and authenticate at will ;)