Default "Configured proxy" settings break our discovery system's authentication
Recently, patrons who install the browser plugins for Zotero have run into problems. This morning's example was a researcher who uses a Mac and Chrome.
She was trying to log into her library account through our Primo discovery system, and she was doing so from off campus. Zotero's proxy bypass kicked in when it needn't have, and kept redirecting her to a Primo page from the University of Saskatchewan. I walked her through opening the Chrome extension options, going to Proxies, and removing the default "configured proxy." After that, she was able to use our library systems without a problem.
When I reported this to the other librarians, they confirmed that they have seen the same issue and resolved it in the same way.
Please consider not having a configured proxy entered by default in new installations of the browser plugins. More and more libraries have proxy strings in all relevant URLs anyway, making this feature redundant for many of us, and the current configuration is causing issues with our primary systems on my campus.
Thank you!
Iris Jastram
She was trying to log into her library account through our Primo discovery system, and she was doing so from off campus. Zotero's proxy bypass kicked in when it needn't have, and kept redirecting her to a Primo page from the University of Saskatchewan. I walked her through opening the Chrome extension options, going to Proxies, and removing the default "configured proxy." After that, she was able to use our library systems without a problem.
When I reported this to the other librarians, they confirmed that they have seen the same issue and resolved it in the same way.
Please consider not having a configured proxy entered by default in new installations of the browser plugins. More and more libraries have proxy strings in all relevant URLs anyway, making this feature redundant for many of us, and the current configuration is causing issues with our primary systems on my campus.
Thank you!
Iris Jastram
Note that this functionality has always been a core (and default) part of Zotero extension for Firefox, which is where the software originally started and as we're on the course to deprecating the old Firefox extension we implemented this feature for the Zotero Connectors.
(As I understand it, the on- vs. off-campus issue Adomas mentions isn't what you're reporting here, though that's another potential issue — the connector may try to redirect sites on-campus even when you already have access. That's often not a problem — the proxy is unnecessary on-campus, but it should still work. There's some logic in the connector to try to avoid that unnecessary proxying based on the hostname of the computer — the "Disable proxy redirection when my domain name contains" setting in the connector proxy preferences — but that may not currently be working as well as it did in the earlier Firefox version. But again, that doesn't sound like your concern here.)