Why am I unable to open some links in Internet Explorer?

Internet Explorer won't open credentialed links

• Disclaimer: I realize this isn't really secure - it isn't meant to be a security measure. So I have several links pointing to sites that have been "Basic Auth" locked down in IIS6. I have formatted the href in the anchor tags to use the following syntax: http://user:[email protected] This works in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but does not work in Internet Explorer. IE will not even attempt to go to the destination. If the url is copy and pasted into the address bar, IE returns what looks like a dns error, which I suppose is a clue to why the links themselves do not work. Does IE honor a different syntax for this kind of stuff or am I just out of luck with getting something like this to work with IE? Thanks!

• Answer:

  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/834489 states this is by design as a security measure. There is a registry workaround that a user can apply, but there's nothing you can do from the webserver side that will override this.