Changing the Firefox captive portal URL

In the following post, you’ll learn how to change the captive portal and connectivity check URL in the Firefox browser.

What is a captive portal?

Ever been connected to a public or hotel WiFi? Chances are, if you tried to connect to it, your phone notified you that you had to “Sign in to Wi-Fi network” – and that’s what a captive portal is: The page that has to be accepted before being able to surf on the net. In some cases like in a hotel, you might have to log in on that page too. You can read more about captive portals on Wikipedia.

But, why should I change it?

Well, in newer Firefox versions, every time you start the browser, it tries to access the following URL:

Firefox versions 89 and higher:

http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html

Firefox versions before 89:

http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt

Self-hosting this page stops our browser from contacting the URL – so… why don’t we just self-host it?

Self-hosting it

To self host the page, you just need a web server and upload (or create) a static file. Also, ensure that your web server doesn’t enforce or forward to the HTTPs equivalent of your site.

Content of the file

The file should only consist of a single line:

Firefox versions 89 and higher:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://support.mozilla.org/kb/captive-portal"/>

Firefox versions before 89:

success

Make sure that there is no line break/new line after the last letter!
If you want to, you can download the file from Mozilla’s server using wget:
wget http://detectportal.firefox.com/<filename e.g. canonical.html or success.txt>

Or, create the file by starting your favorite editor – make sure to turn of automatic line breaks at the end of the file.

nano -L <filename e.g. canonical.html or success.txt>

Changing the URL

Changing the URL(s) is easy: Type about:config into the address bar in Firefox.

First, change the URL for the entry captivedetect.canonicalURL – or, if you want to, turn off the captive portal check completely by setting network.captive-portal-service.enabled to false.

After that, we’re going to do the same thing again for network.connectivity-service.IPv4.url and network.connectivity-service.IPv6.url.
You may also disable the connectivity-service check by changing the network.connectivity-service.enabled to false.

You can learn more about all Firefox connections and URLs at the Mozilla Support Pages: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

My URLs

If you’re lazy or don’t have an own web server you can use my URLs too. Logging is disabled for this site:

http://conntest.yxa.at/success.php

And for IPv6:

http://conntest.yxa.at/success.php?ip6

Source (works for both Firefox < 89 and >= 89):

<?php
$browser = get_browser(null, true);
if($browser["browser"] === "Firefox") {
        if($browser["majorver"] >= 89) {
                die('<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://support.mozilla.org/kb/captive-portal"/>');
        } else {
                die('success');
        }
}

die('<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://support.mozilla.org/kb/captive-portal"/>');

That’s it!

You should now see logs (if enabled) in your web server’s files when you start Firefox.

Make sure to check out my captive portal post for Android too.