When I join a hotspot using my MacBook Pro, sometimes a dedicated web browser window comes up and navigates me to a portal where I can agree to terms or purchase wifi. Other times, that window doesn’t come up at all and any website I attempt to navigate to just stalls on “Connecting…”. Now, me being a technical person, I am aware that if I try to go to an HTTPS page (which is just about any page I’d normally go to now), the hotspot is not able to redirect me to a portal. So I deliberately try to find an HTTP page I can go to, then I instantly properly get redirected to a portal and can proceed to get on the internet.

I am perplexed by this, specifically: 1. How do non-technical people successfully get on the internet with these hotspots? If I didn’t know to go to an HTTP page, I feel like I would be stuck on hanging page requests forever. 2. One thing I’ve noticed is that macOS seems to use http://captive.apple.com to test for portals. For many hotspots, it seems like this is correctly captured and redirected to the portal. But for the hotspots I mentioned above, this URL simply returns “Success” with no portal redirect headers. Is this deliberate? Why would a hotspot try to circumvent this detection from Apple? 3. Am I misunderstanding this whole situation or have some aspect in my environment that makes this a very different experience for me than for others?