Can't open captive portal

brooksvb

I have been having issues while traveling and using various wifi networks where I can't get the captive portal page to come up. I connect to wifi, try to open some page (google.com, test.com, whatever), and what is supposed to happen is I get redirected to the captive portal. But this only seems to work for like 50% of the networks I connect to. The rest of the 50% it just spins its wheels until it finally gives me a page saying I don't have internet.

So I have discovered the temporary solution to my problem is to open up Mozilla Firefox, which immediately has a prompt underneath the address bar to open up the captive portal page, which I can click and it takes me directly to the page. No fuss, no delay.

Why isn't it this easy in Vivaldi?

Pathduck

@brooksvb Yeah, captive portals suck. Thankfully I don't travel much

Also Chromium-based browser suck at detecting these. It's not just Vivaldi.

A possible solution I've heard about is opening an unencrypted connect to specific pages to "trigger" the captive portal. Or something like that, not sure of the details here, I don't travel.

Try:
http://neverssl.com
http://example.com

brooksvb

@pathduck Makes me wanna cry

Thank you for the tip though. I haven't tried that so we will see how it works for me next time.

DoctorG

@brooksvb Please do not cry, read Help us to reproduce the issue carefully and then report bug to Vivaldi tracker.

Pathduck

@guigirl A "captive portal" is the kind of crap hotels, cafes and airports throw at you when you want to use their "free wifi".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/network-portal-detection
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k-gP2sswzYNvryu9NcgN7q5XrsMlUdlUdoW9WRaEmfM/edit

It often causes all kinds of stuff like security warnings, timeouts and DNS errors, as they are mostly really badly implemented. Then throw modern crap like HTTP/2, QUIC and DoH into the mix and it turns into a right mess.

Going to an unencrypted URL first is a way to make sure the portal redirect (or DNS hijack) works as it should.

These idiots are breaking the internet, and once I'm Supreme Leader, they will be first against the wall...

hlehyaric

@guigirl Negotiate what? Put all of them against the wall…