not all captive portals work

[Julia Palandri]

It has happened to me that many captive portals don't work with my phone; as in it doesn't even offer me the chance to enter the login details. This is somehow important for someone that travels and uses airport and hotel's wifis. Can I help in any way to help to better understand the problem and solve it? It's not even that the system doesn't tell me to login; sometimes the browser won't take me anywhere useful to login and get access.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

@julia I think we will need more details on this, it may be more on the wifi AP setup side where the issues lie
fwiw I have accessed all such portals the past few months without problems, in my experience you need to open a new tab and enter a new address request to trigger the proper behavior.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I don’t travel that much, but the few occasions I tested it in the past it worked as intended (last time was several months ago though, the platform has evolved a lot since then, and it’s not impossible that this particular functionality has regressed).

In my experience, captive portals will redirect you to their login page if you browse to a plain HTTP URL. Browsing to an HTTPS URL won’t do the redirection. And usually pages like e.g. google.com get you HTTPS by default. So you might want to try a page for which you’re sure there won’t be encryption (try e.g. http://example.org), just in case that’s where the issue lies.

Marking incomplete for now, more information to help the understand the issue better is welcome.

[Julia Palandri (julia-palandri)]

Thanks for the comments, I'll make sure I use an http url next times and will fill in the details if I have any new findings.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for webbrowser-app (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]