1156553 - Tab queue makes captive portal use annoying

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Overlays, defect)

Description

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

STR:

With tab queue enabled...
1) Click a WiFi network with a captive portal
2) The system will prompt you to sign into the WiFi network, typically by notification. Click it.

Expected: Nightly opens
Actual: A toast that the tab was opened in background - you have to click "Open now?" to open the link

I would never want to background that action so it's annoying to have to use the toast. This could be compounded by bug 1149645 (i.e. toast being at the bottom of the screen).

However, I'm not sure fixing this is possible since Intents are intentionally anonymous (though maybe we can tell it's from the system?).

Perhaps there are common URLs on captive portals and heuristically open Fennec in those cases?

Ah, well - investigate!

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Users on mobile devices may hit this a lot. We should consider this before shipping.

Comment 2

[Martyn Haigh (:mhaigh)]

In YVR airport I'm getting the url of http://216.58.216.174/generate_204 for the wifi login page.  The ip resolves to belonging to Google.  A search points me to the url clients1.google.com which resolves to the ip above.  I'll try and do some more digging to see if any of this can be used to accurately work out if we're hitting a portal.

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

17:10:09 < mhaigh> well https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/lollipop-release/packages/CaptivePortalLogin/src/com/android/captiveportallogin/CaptivePortalLoginActivity.java
                   indicates that the generate_204 doesn't.  Perhaps we check against that to open now and feel bad if someone else has that at the end of their url
17:10:09 <@rnewman> (in an emulator if necessary)
17:10:40 < mhaigh> this is with 4.4.4
17:10:58 <@rnewman> check for clients3.google.com or Settings.Global(..., "captive_portal_server")
17:11:30 <@rnewman> + /generate_204

Comment 4

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

Talking to Martyn, this is going to be a bit more complicated than anticipated and we're going to move this to V2 for now.

Comment 5

[Martyn Haigh (:mhaigh)]

This is going to be difficult as we get no contextual information about the url we're passed, so the only approach for this bug that I can see is matching the "/generate_204" at the end of the url.  

I'm worried that this approach won't be global and have no way to verify this.

I think I can test patches if I go to a nearby coffee shop and hope that a local wifi spot is a captive portal, but this will be far from a thorough approach.

Comment 6

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Based on comment 4, this doesn't need to track 42.

Comment 7

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Starting from Android 5.0 clicking the notification should open the portal site in a system activity using a WebView (also linked by Richard above):
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/lollipop-release/packages/CaptivePortalLogin/src/com/android/captiveportallogin/CaptivePortalLoginActivity.java

With tab queues now being disabled on Android 2.3 this can only happen on Android 4, I guess?

Comment 8

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Chenxia mentioned in the front-end meeting today that desktop detects when captive portals are trying to load and forwards the user to the portal – perhaps we can use a similar method of detection for Tab Queue?

Chenxia, do you know much about this?

Comment 9

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #8)
> Chenxia mentioned in the front-end meeting today that desktop detects when
> captive portals are trying to load and forwards the user to the portal –
> perhaps we can use a similar method of detection for Tab Queue?
> 
> Chenxia, do you know much about this?

snorp pointed me to nsICaptivePortalService:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/base/nsICaptivePortalService.idl

Comment 10

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

This is in v2.

Comment 11

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