I'm actually curious how anyone not a geek gets on Wifi at many coffee shops etc...

ckuehl · on July 30, 2016

Most operating systems have started detecting captive portals and presenting a notification. All of the modern consumer ones (OS X, Windows, Android, iOS) appear to have this detection. (I don't use it so not sure how well it works, though.)

mseebach · on July 30, 2016

I used to stay a lot at a hotel that would "helpfully" exempt a good number of domains from the captive browser, including whatever macs and androids use to detect connectivity...

There should really be a standard for dealing with this, like a flag on DHCP saying "O HAI you need to login here", and providing a REST endpoint that will tell the OS the status of the connection at any given time.

praseodym · on July 30, 2016

As if such a standard would help for these WiFi providers that explicitly take steps to avoid captive portal detection?

nsgi · on July 30, 2016

Surely it's not in their interest to avoid captive portal detection, anyway? After all, it helps them advertise their product!

icebraining · on July 30, 2016

Bugs will happen, but it's a very simply operation, they simply load an HTTP URL that has an expected response (Google's is just a 204 No Content) and check if it matches.

cmdrfred · on July 30, 2016

Chromebook does as well. Works great.

jjp · on July 30, 2016

1. Complain that the internet isn't working. 2. Talk to friendly geek who explains going to non Secure site forces pop-up 3. Forget that this work around applied in all cafe and not just the one were problem solved. Goto 1.