Last night, I tried to display a basic auth protected page but without any success because I didn't know the credentials. Obviously, I got a 401 Error.
Today, I was back to that page with the credentials but Google Chrome wouldn't display the basic auth dialog anymore. How annoying to have directly the HTTP 401 Error page right away!
I found the fix from this page and I'm sharing it here so it will be faster for me to get to the fix as it might be for you as well.
Anyway, from the command line (I'm a OSX user), run the following commands:
$ defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.google.Chrome.plist AuthSchemes basic,digest,ntlm,negotiate
# Restart Chrome
$ osascript -e 'quit app "Chrome"'
$ open -a "Google Chrome"
That's it.
This command should re-add back the basic value to the AuthSchemes key of your Chrome configuration.
It should be quite similar for Linux users while Windows users might need to hack into the Registry Base.
Have fun!