Tired of signing in

April 14, 2009 5:22 AM

Whenever I quit Firefox, it loses my authentication so I have to sign into Metafilter again. It didn't always do this, but for some reason, it does now.

Internet Explorer doesn't do it. Just Firefox. I don't think it's a bug, I think I've changed a setting but I cant find out what it is for the life of me and its driving me nuts. Options/Privacy/Always clear my private data when I quit Firefox isn't ticked, so it's not that.

And it's just Metafilter. Other sites keep me logged in. I've tried deleting my cookies. No joy.

Does anyone have a clue what it could be?

posted by PeterMcDermott to MetaFilter-Related at 5:22 AM (29 comments total)

Have you looked in the Exceptions under Cookies? Firefox (at least in my experience) has an annoying habit of randomly adding websites into the various Exceptions lists. Maybe Metafilter got added to the Cookies Exceptions so that no MeFi cookies are being set?
posted by Thorzdad at 5:31 AM on April 14, 2009

Try changing your password.
posted by preparat at 5:32 AM on April 14, 2009

I've noticed this too, if I quit Firefox and leave it closed for more than a few minutes several sites get logged out. If I restart Firefox immediately after quitting it everything's fine. I also have a shit ton of plugins loaded, and I don't feel like narrowing the cause down so I ignore it.
posted by Science! at 5:46 AM on April 14, 2009

I've had problems with Firefox's attempts to save state on exit. When you quit FF, are you telling it to save your tabs? If so, try not doing that once so you get a clean restart. (A hassle, I know.)

Also, while I don't think it actually works this way, see if FF has saved more than one username/password for MeFi for you. Maybe it just doesn't know what to fill in.
posted by DU at 5:47 AM on April 14, 2009

Also, while I don't think it actually works this way, see if FF has saved more than one username/password for MeFi for you. Maybe it just doesn't know what to fill in.

I actually used to run into that problem all the time. Every I messed up a password Firefox would remember it and try and load it, sometimes several wrong passwords were in the "cycle", meaning I had to retype the password each time. And it would try and load a bad password for an automatic login, though I have no idea how it selected what password to use. This has vanished in the latest versions of FF3, and I don't recall with what version it stopped happening.
posted by Science! at 6:00 AM on April 14, 2009

I don't think the "several different passwords" answer is applicable to this case, though, as I have the same problem and only one username/password for MeFi. And it's only happened to me since updating to the latest version of Firefox, as well.
posted by misha at 6:14 AM on April 14, 2009

Firefox options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> Keep Until -> They Expire.
posted by knave at 7:40 AM on April 14, 2009

knave: "Firefox options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> Keep Until -> They Expire."

I have the same problem as of two days ago. The above didn't fix it.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:14 AM on April 14, 2009

I'm with you! Except it's all sites for me. Ever since the most recent FF update, FF drops all of my cookies when it quits. It's not a setting, either, because it's NOT set to clear cookies on clearing private data, and it's NOT set to clear private data when quitting, and the cookie setting is set to keep until they EXPIRE and I'm going INSANE having to log in EVERYWHERE each time I start Firefox.

Please tell me I'm not alone.
posted by xmutex at 8:22 AM on April 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

xmutex, I don't have the solution, but this started for me on all sites after (I think) the update before the latest one. And then it stopped and Firefox stopped dropping my cookies. Unfortunately, I don't know why. I was worried it would do the same thing with the latest update but did not.
posted by Airhen at 8:38 AM on April 14, 2009

I think this IE issue needs to be posted on /. so MS can be properly flamed for not being able to make a decent web browser and killing kittens. Oh wait.
posted by jmd82 at 8:58 AM on April 14, 2009

Why do we need a reason to flame MS?
posted by jerseygirl at 9:12 AM on April 14, 2009

The setting you should uncheck is "Automatically download and install the update"
posted by Sys Rq at 9:30 AM on April 14, 2009

Cold comfort guys, but I want to thank you for alerting me to ignore all the prompts to install that new update.
posted by CunningLinguist at 11:20 AM on April 14, 2009

Ugh, it's been doing the same thing for me, except luckily MeFi isn't one of the sites that's doing it. So far I've noticed various Google sites doing it, a couple of message boards here and there, and Twitter. I thought I was the only one, and it's kind of a pain in the balls.
posted by booticon at 11:56 AM on April 14, 2009

What's your password? Lemme try logging in to see if I can replicate the problem.
posted by asterix at 1:22 PM on April 14, 2009

Could I have your Visa numbers and expiration date? I promise to buy you a pair of gold kid stilettos too.
posted by Cranberry at 1:32 PM on April 14, 2009

OK, it's definitely not you, it's me.

I think it had to have been something screwed up with Firefox. I decided to try and roll back to a decent back-up disk image, and everything came good again.

Perhaps it was a bad plug in? Who knows? Here's a strange thing though: the cookies that Mefi was sending me for stuff like user_token, user_name and user_id were all set to expire at end of session on the bad set-up.

On this good set-up, they're all set to expire on 3rd April, 2039.

Is there something on my machine that sets these expiry dates? Something in my browser, somewhere? Because I can't figure out why they'd be expiring different in IE to the expiry time in Firefox?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:35 PM on April 14, 2009

What's your password?

Oh, it's the one that I always use. ********
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:36 PM on April 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

I have this exact same problem with my Firefox install at home, but it never remembers any of my "saved" passwords. Since the last update, I have to login to every site every time I restart the program - just like xmutex's experience.

I have disabled all extensions, cleared cookies and saved passwords, toggled and untoggled the "clear passwords on exit" setting, toggled and untoggled the "save cookies until they expire" setting, deleted user.js and cleared prefs.js. Nothing has helped. My next step is to reinstall the program from scratch, I just don't have the time to do that. Instead, I try to never close the program.
posted by rhapsodie at 2:58 PM on April 14, 2009

I generally don't have this problem, because instead of ending the process I kill it. In doing so, even though my privacy settings are turned up to 11, with no cache and no passwords saved, even after completely shutting down the computer and booting it again, I can still click the Internets icon on my dock and the last Metafilter page I visited will come right up, and I'm still logged in. The command I use is: killall -9 firefox. I don't know how you would make that work in Windows, but if you can find out how to kill the Firefox process instead of just ending it, it should save everything.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:40 PM on April 14, 2009

The command I use is: killall -9 firefox. I don't know how you would make that work in Windows, but if you can find out how to kill the Firefox process instead of just ending it, it should save everything.

Task Manager/Processes/Right click on Firefox/End Process -- but I bet this wouldn't work in Windows. I think it was manually killing processes that had hung that resulted in my having to do a backup in the first place.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:29 PM on April 14, 2009

So you don't have a "Kill Process" option if you right-click it in the Task Manager? Ah well. Might be a bit of work to go through just to save the session anyway.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 5:32 PM on April 14, 2009

My next step is to reinstall the program from scratch

I tried that rhapsodie. That didn't work either.

I've got a sense that I might have hosed something in my registry, but who or how or what, I haven't a clue.

On the other hand, it did start about two days ago -- same as it did for KevinSkomvold, so who knows, perhaps it was a crappy add-on that did it that I haven't got installed in this build?

I notice I haven't got Greasemonkey or any of my Metafilter Greasemonkey scripts installed yet.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:33 PM on April 14, 2009

Nah, just an End Process and an End Process Tree.

I actually use SysInternals Process Explorer, and that *does* have a Kill Process. But I suspect not many people would have that installed.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:35 PM on April 14, 2009

And it may well be that the only difference between the two apps is in what they call it, not what it does.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:37 PM on April 14, 2009

Hey, I had this problem a couple weeks ago with the FF update before last. AND I SOLVED IT! Just go and create another firefox profile and use the new one instead of default. If you use Foxmarks (or, I guess it's Xmarks now), it's totally easy to get your bookmarks and search thingies back. I haven't had a problem since then, even with the most recent update. (As annoying as it was to create a new profile, it took way less time than having to sign in everywhere every time...and the griping. It cut down on my griping.)
posted by phunniemee at 7:14 AM on April 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

Oh my god! phunniemee wins a prize! Thanks!
posted by xmutex at 8:33 AM on April 15, 2009

I thought clearing prefs.js was the same as creating a new profile? Maybe not, I'll try that tonight. Thanks phunniemee!
posted by rhapsodie at 12:57 PM on April 15, 2009