Should Betterfox continue to disable Firefox’s captive portal detection by default?

[yokoffing]

Overview

Background

Firefox’s captive portal detection helps users connect to public Wi-Fi (hotels, airports, etc.) by redirecting to login pages. For example: #371. You can also read more about it on Mozilla Support and Firefox Source Docs.

Why this matters

I’ve hesitated because while I personally use a different browser for captive portals, this isn’t seamless for new user.js users — who account for most support requests.

Also, Betterfox primarily balances privacy/security with a unique emphasis on usability among Firefox forks and user.js projects.

Other browsers

• Brave has this enabled, and there is not opt out for it AFAIK: Captive portal detection may not be working brave/brave-browser#20181
• Waterfox leaves it enabled.
• Tor disables it, but they are a different use case than "everyday privacy": https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40322
• Librewolf follows AF and has it disabled, which causes friction with some users: https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/comments/1h18y00/reenable_captive_portal_support/

Option 1: Enable captive portal detection

• Works out-of-the-box (our core use case)
  • We also claim this in the README.
• Reduces support issues from casual users

We would leave the following prefs in there default states, which are:

user_pref("captivedetect.canonicalURL", "http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html"); 
user_pref("network.captive-portal-service.enabled", true); 
user_pref("network.connectivity-service.enabled", true); 

Option 2: Leave captive portal detection off

• Minor privacy gain (stops connectivity checks)
• Appeals to advanced users who:
  • Don’t use public Wi-Fi often
  • Already have a workflow for captive portals

[philg-dev]

I think enabling it by default will be better for a wider audience. Making sure that all use cases still work out of the box is great in my opinion because that makes the default betterfox suitable for less tech-savvy people as well who are just seeking more privacy without diving deeper.

Also from the perspective of somebody running into this problem "just randomly", maybe after having betterfox installed for weeks or months already without issues, it might be really difficult for some people to even trace back the cause to be in betterfox - and for many people it will certainly not be the very first thought on their mind. So e.g. when you're usually at home and everything works and you take your laptop on vacation and need to use some public WiFis, you'll just be surprised why it isn't working. If you're lucky you'll have a fallback browser that will let you login regardless, but otherwise you might be stuck with no connection for the time being and maybe can't even troubleshoot the issue through searching the web, as you're offline.

Thanks for the consideration - I voted for "enable captive portal detection".

[HighValueWarrior]

Enable.
As you say, if someone needs that protection they can add it easily.

[IdleUrsid]

On this one, I opt for "option 1" to leave the captive portal detection enabled and write an optional entry to disable it for advanced users. This is to keep Betterfox more accessible to the wider audience, especially those that travel a lot between hotspots and keep them connected to the internet.