Autofill Windows Auth? In Your Dreams, Peasant

Another day, another moist pile of human misery lands in my inbox demanding to know why their precious fucking browser won’t autofill credentials into a Windows authentication dialog. Listen up, you sack of poorly-compiled organs: this isn’t a bug, it’s a *feature*. And by feature, I mean it’s yet another reason why Microsoft should be tried for crimes against humanity at The Hague.

The problem is simple, much like the mouth-breathers who complain about it. HTTP basic authentication—those cute little browser popups—live in the browser’s happy little sandbox. Windows authentication, on the other hand, is NTLM/Kerberos garbage that lives in the operating system’s septic tank, where no mortal application is allowed to touch it. The browser might as well try to autofill your mother’s maiden name into God’s own password prompt for all the good it’ll do.

You see, Credential Manager—that digital equivalent of a sticky note under your keyboard—is powerless here. Windows treats these auth dialogs like they’re protecting the nuclear football, and refuses to let any software pre-fill them because *apparently* that would be less secure than forcing users to manually type “Password123!” seventeen times a day until they just give up and tattoo it on their forearm.

By default, Windows gleefully passes your currently logged-in domain credentials, which is fucking brilliant if you happen to be logged in as the right user. But you’re not, because why would anything ever be that simple? You’re logged in as “pleb.user” but you need “god.admin” access, and suddenly you’re in a world of pain.

The *official* workaround—because calling it a “solution” would be like calling a kick in the teeth dental care—is to use RunAs. Specifically:

Option A: RunAs with /netonly, which runs the browser as your sad pleb self but uses different credentials for network auth. You’ll get prompted every time, because consistency is for weaklings.

Option B: RunAs with /savecred, which stores credentials locally like a fucking security nightmare waiting to happen. Hope you enjoy manual cleanup when passwords change, because Windows sure as shit won’t help you.

Some heroic bastard wrote a PowerShell script to automate this circus, creating shortcuts for each credential set you need. Because nothing says “enterprise-ready software” like needing a custom script to handle basic fucking authentication.

So there you have it. You can’t autofill these dialogs because Microsoft’s design philosophy is “make it painful enough and maybe they’ll stop asking for things.” It’s not a technical limitation, it’s a middle finger to productivity disguised as security theater.

https://4sysops.com/archives/autofill-credentials-into-the-windows-authentication-dialog-fails/

Last week, some MBA-brained manager asked why we can’t just “make it work like Chrome does with websites.” I explained the architectural differences three times, each time using smaller words. On the fourth explanation, I just told him that the server ghosts would become angry and delete our files if we tried. He’s now convinced we need an exorcist and has approved budget for “paranormal IT consulting.” Sometimes, my job is its own reward.

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