Browser pre-authentication

Question

I have an applet that is contained on a page for which Basic Authentication is required.
The applet itself makes calls to the same web-server, to a script, for which the same authentication is required. i.e. its in the same realm.
Communication is through the HttpURLConnection class.
When viewing the page within Internet Explorer (on windows), the applet does not ask me for authentication, it uses that of the Browser, for which a username and password has already been given. This, for me is the desired behaviour.
However, under netscape / mozilla / firefox (on both windows and linux) the applet displays its own login / password window.
Has anyone else found this, and perhaps found a workaround?
I am using plug-in version 1.4.2_04 on windows.
If it is not possible to to do this client side, perhaps somebody knows a way that I could clone the authentication information, server side, and pass it back to the applet through another means (via parameters when the applet page is generated), Does anyone know if this information is available in the CGI environment, and which Environment variables & HTTP headers would be used?
Regards
Nick

Answer 1

For anyone who is interested I managed to solve my own problem here, in a somewhat unorthodox way.
As I have access to the web server (apache), I added a RewriteRule, which passes the HTTP Authorization header to my cgi script. It take the form:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},PT]
Which basically says : for any URL create an environment variable (HTTP_AUTHORIZATION), and set it to the value of the Authorization HTTP header.
So in my cgi script which generates my applet tag, I pass this value to my applet, via a parameter.
And set it for my HttpURLConnection using the following
URL url = new URL("http://blah/blah.cgi");
HttpURLConnection server = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
server.setRequestProperty("Authorization", getParameter("auth"));
server.connect();
Hope somebody finds this useful
Nick