Comment 0 for bug 914507

Last year I travelled around a lot. And I saw that almost everywhere there are WiFi Hotspots now: at airports, Hotels, train stations, public buildings and in cafes.
These Hotspots normally redirect all traffic to a special IP address which provides a Welcome page with a login form. Accessing this server with another protocol does not work, which is not a problem for POP3, IMAP or SSH, but it is a problem if you connect by https, because your browser will recognise the wrong security certificate or the port is not even used (which is even better in my opinion).
1) So if I open a browser it automatically tries to open its Start page which is https in my case (I use the HTTPS Everywhere plugin in my firefox). Because it uses https, I will not be redirected to the login page and am waiting in front of an empty page. Then I manually have to open a link which does not use https and get redirected to the login page.
2) Another annoying thing are other users who open a saved browser session. All saved (http-)tabs will be redirected to the welcome page so that it does not make any sense anymore to save the browser session.
3) Firefox also sometimes does compatibily checks and plugin updates at start time. These also fail when trying to login to a Hotspot network.

How can we solve this problem?

First, network manager should check if the connected wireless network is a Hotspot network. This chan be done by a simple http request to a stable and well-known page, for example http://gnome.org/netcheck which returns a known token (something like "Yes, you are connected to the Internet").
- If the token is returned, everything is fine and the user has connection
- If it does not receive this token but a redirect, it should open a special browser-window (not the default browser because of the reasons above) which allows to log-in to the network before other internet applications are started.
- In any other case, network manager could try another server (backup) or stop probing.

For known wireless networks, network manager could also provide a setting to disable/autodetect/force hotspot login.