This surprised me a little...

Whilst fault finding issues with different browsers and OS's accessing SharePoint I discovered there is growing support for NTLM (Windows Authentication) in all the most popular browsers. This is somewhat of a relief because without this support I was looking at Basic over SSL to deliver the required security for a customers internal facing deployment. If we enable Basic and NTLM by default it means some browsers will send user passwords in clear text. Not the best outcome.

However if I can define supported browsers that all allow NTLM we are good to go...

Of course there are issues as outlined in this post that started in 2005, specifically with Safari on a Mac:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6102379

Windows version of Safari appears to provide support, currently in Beta:

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Firefox looks like it can do NTLM tricks, we'll see:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/eric.wise/archive/2006/11/16/Note-to-self_3A00_-Firefox-Windows-Authentication.aspx

I won't hold my breath but it looks promising.

John Hodgson (HP Australia)