I haven't posted something on the blog in a while, so I thought I'd post something about my current work at Mozilla.

I'm currently working on better captive portal detection in Firefox. You might correctly point out that there is no such detection at the moment. The feature does exist, but it's only enabled on Firefox OS. My job going forward will be to port this functionality over to Firefox, and to implement several enhancements.

My first step was to gather all of the bugs and relevant info into a wiki page. The good news is that most of the groundwork is already there. The design for this feature has already been done (incidentally, by another Valentin working at Mozilla), and my job is to implement the capabilities that Necko needs to provide to other components.

In order to test captive portal, I needed to set up one for myself - working at my local McDonald's is not an option :) Fortunately, this feature is part of the Tomato firmware which is also available for my Asus N10U router. Yay!

Next up, making captive portal detection available to desktop Firefox. The feature is implemented in captivedetect.js. The basic idea is that it tries to load a page from a predefined URL, and check the response against an expected value. If the values differ, or if we get a redirect, the odds are that we are inside a captive portal.

On FirefoxOS the captive portal detection is used in the NetworkManager, which is a Gonk service which isn't going to be of much use on desktop. So I just stuck a captive portal request inside nsIOService, to see if it works. After finding and fixing a couple of typos in captivedetect.js (How can you not love JavaScript for this?), it turns out that this works pretty well. I was able to observe notifications whenever the browser got a captive portal page and when the user logged in to that page, and was able to access any page on the web. So really
good news.

Going forward, I need to figure out how the captive portal fits with the rest of Necko, what I need for the UI, how do we handle secure connections, and many other issues. Also, Tomato doesn't seem to hijack secure connections, as other captive portals do, but I'm going to figure this out when I get to it.