I've experienced this several times, but most recently on the Toronto office's "Mozilla Guest" network and at the Marriott San Jose. Firefox can't load most captive portal login pages. I'll type in, for example, google.com, and that'll be intercepted and redirected to something else, but that something else never loads. In the Mozilla Guest network case, Firefox will sit waiting for securelogin.arubanetworks.com until finally I get a "The connection was interrupted" page. In all cases, loading in a different browser - for example, Safari or Chrome - works perfectly.

If you can reproduce somewhat reliably.... 1) Get an HTTP log using https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTTP_Logging 2) Do you see the problem with a clean profile or in safe mode? 3) Do you see the problem in older Firefox versions?

(In reply to Boris Zbarsky (:bz) from comment #1) > 2) Do you see the problem with a clean profile or in safe mode? My logs are all in fresh profiles. I will test safe mode too, though. > 3) Do you see the problem in older Firefox versions? Not in Firefox 2, but yes in Firefox 3.6. I'll see if I can find a regression window.

(In reply to Joe Drew (:JOEDREW!) from comment #5) > My logs are all in fresh profiles. I will test safe mode too, though. Safe mode has no effect. > Not in Firefox 2, but yes in Firefox 3.6. I'll see if I can find a > regression window. Last good nightly: 2010-02-07 First bad nightly: 2010-02-08 Pushlog: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=fc3d32011d31&tochange=05c983938253 Seems like one of bug 535649, Bug 540332, or Bug 527659. Kai, any ideas?

Joe, This may be related to OCSP attempting to validate the captive portal certificate before the client has been granted access to the network. Does disabling OCSP fix the problem?