604975 - New window shouldn't point to about:home when launched by Windows to provide additional login information

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Windows 7 puts up a prompt that says "Your internet connection may require a username/password to log in, click here to open your browser" -- but with about:home, we never hit a server, thus we never get a chance to hit the captive portal.

Could be confusing to users.  One thought might be to add more UI -- in the background, especially if we've just had a connectivity changed event, attempt to get some well-known mozilla.org page.  If that gets redirected, then put up some UI on the home page that says that you may need to log in, and have it take you to the captive portal.

We can also just do nothing, because they'll hit the captive portal if they actually try to search, though that's annoying too.

Comment 1

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

I don't think this confusion is worth holding the release on. I'm consistently confused, frustrated and generally pissed-off by captive portals without the aid of about:home. Blocking-.

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Resummarizing. While I agree this shouldn't block, it also shouldn't be lost.

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Oh, and I don't think this depends on bug 562917, though I do think a solution would be easier with that resolved.

Comment 4

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

If we want to use the Windows APIs to detect this case then the information below from from https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/05/18/how-windows-detects-a-captive-network-portal-and-prompts-to-open-a-browser.aspx will help:

"Applications which want to make use of this information can use the Network List Manager API. There's a get_IsConnectedToInternet method on the INetwork interface and the captive portal flag can be found by looking at the VT_UINTs named NA_InternetConnectivityV4 and NA_InternetConnectivityV6 in the INetwork's property bag. If the flag NLM_INTERNET_CONNECTIVITY_WEBHIJACK is set, then a captive portal was detected."