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by jspash 1879 days ago
Ahhh. I miss the days of the username and password being on the same page! I refuse to believe that the average internet user gets confused by a two field form that they need to break it into two (usually slow) steps. Re-architected in (usually flaky) javascript. That takes up (always more) of my time!

(sorry for the !!!'s. but this one really gets my goat)

1 comments

That's to support single sign-on. It checks whether to show the in-house sign-in page or to redirect.
This one is a significant failure of our entire industry. We've somehow accepted that degrading user experience because of an implementation detail is good instead of working together to hide that implementation detail by implementing the necessary browser functionality.

We already have technologies such as Kerberos that are supported in every browser and seem like they would solve this problem.

In any case, as a website operator you can mitigate this. Have separate pages for SSO/non-SSO, dynamically hide the password field if the username is associated with an SSO provider, or just ignore the password field and have a subtitle along the lines of "leave password empty for SSO accounts".

It's not obvious to me that it's an improvement to have an extra textbox that goes away moments after you type in your email address (possibly after you've tabbed into it to start typing) or an extra textbox that just stays there unused.
Can’t you detect it client side? Send the contents of the username field to the backend, if it’s SSO change the password field to “login with ssoprovider.com”
It's even worse user experience since things change as you type (you have to wait for network round trip so it's not instant), plus password managers are still confused.
I thought it was to make scraping slightly more difficult.