1738737 - After a 7 minute power failure, on restart a "captive portal detection tab" error (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/captive-portal) occured on about three dozen browser tabs across the 8 iMac spaces and many Firefox open browser windows I use.

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[John Santarius]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:93.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/93.0

Steps to reproduce:

Neighborhood power failed. About 7 minutes later it returned and I restarted the iMac (2020 Retina 5K running macOS Monterey, ver 12.0.1).

Actual results:

On many of the Firefox (93.0) windows being used, an extra tab appeared with a "captive portal detection" notice along with the previously opened tabs. About 36 tabs with this notice had to be tracked down and closed over the 8 iMac Spaces in use. The other tabs came back and worked without problems. This "captive portal detection" problem, nor even a single instance of it, had previously occurred during my many years of using Firefox.

Expected results:

The "captive portal detection" notice should not have been given, certainly not on some three dozen tabs that required excessive time to track down and close.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Session Restore' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Hi John, thank you for taking the time to submit this issue. Moving this to Core:: Networking component so our developers can take a look at it.

Comment 3

[(inactive) Nihanth Subramanya [:nhnt11]]

Attachment: captive portal error page screenshot

John, could you confirm that this notice you're talking about looked like the screenshot I've attached?

Comment 4

[John Santarius]

Attachment: CaptivePortalDetectionTabIssue.png

Hello Nihanth,

The tabs all appeared in the form of the attached screenshot (CaptivePortalDetectionTabIssue.png) from the address https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/captive-portal. A window like the screenshot that you attached may have opened, but a power failure on the iMac requires a lot of housekeeping for recovery, and all of the other previously open Firefox tabs came back ok, as did other aspects of the Internet connection, so I did not associate the "Log in to network" message with the captive portal detection tabs.

John

PS The attachment may be in a separate message.

Comment 5

[(inactive) Nihanth Subramanya [:nhnt11]]

That's very helpful, thanks! We should be opening such a tab at most in one tab (in the active window) so it's concerning that the tab was opened by many windows. This might be a regression, I'll be back here with updates when I get a chance to investigate this more. ni? myself for tracking.

Comment 6

[John Santarius]

Hello,

Just did a controlled logout and shutdown, and the "captive portal detection" tabs did not appear, so the problem seems to be connected with iMac recovery from a power failure.

John

Comment 7

[(inactive) Nihanth Subramanya [:nhnt11]]

Unassigning myself. I didn't see anything particularly obvious to fix here when I looked into bug 1743148.

Please let us know if this happens again. For now let's keep this on file but I don't think it's actionable other than an audit/refactor of our captive portal UI code.

Comment 8

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin]]

I think MacOS could be closing sockets with a weird error code when recovering from a power failure, which would trigger the captive portal detection if it happens at the same time. This seems like a rare edge case, but maybe we can find a fix sometime in the future.