At first, I thought the problem could of been with Facebook – some of their AJAX user interface getting carried away or something, however I narrowed down the problem to Firefox by trying the site in IE.

I did some Googling, and found other people were having the same problem, and that they had narrowed down the problem to the Skype add-on for Firefox.

The Skype add-on detects phone numbers within a web page, and renders them as a Skype call button – so that you can easily call numbers from a web page.

The amount I actually use this feature is far far less than that of Facebook, so I decided to disable the add-on (at least until they fix the issues with it)

Here’s how:

1) Click the Tools –> Add-ons menu in Firefox

2) Click the Uninstall button next to the “Skype extension for Firefox” in the resulting dialog.

3) Restart Firefox.

That should fix the issues with Facebook (and any other website that is showing similar problems)

Firefox, my browser of choice, doesn’t support NTLM “out of the box”

What that means is, if you visit a site on your domain (for example http://intranet) that you should have access to, you’re presented with a username and password box.
Visit the same site in IE, and it lets you straight through, based on your credentials.

What you need to do, is explicitly set the allowed URIs that Firefox is allowed to pass your credentials to.
Since I only use this on a couple of sites, it’s not really a problem.

Here’s how to do it:

Step One

Load about:config in Firefox (more information on about:config)
Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” (and make sure you are careful, you did promise….)

Step Two

Locate network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
The easiest way to do this is to type “network.automatic” into the filter box. Then, only two entries show up.
Double click network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

Step Three

Enter your url into the box.
In my case, it’s http://intranet

That’s it! Firefox will now allow NTLM on that url!

After getting the Azure Samples loaded, I tried running one of them (just by hitting F5 in VS) and, as Firefox is my default browser, got a “Port Restricted For Security Reasons” error.

Of course, it worked fine in IE

Here is what to do –

It turns out, that my application was trying to use port 87 on 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1:87)

Load up Firefox. Type about:config in the address bar, and hit enter. You will get something like the following:

Right click, and click New -> String.

Set the preference name to: network.security.ports.banned.override

Next, set the value to: 87 (or whatever port your app is using)

Done!