Disable Firefox Captive Portal and Connection to detectportal.firefox.com

How to Disable Firefox Captive Portal and Connection to detectportal.firefox.com

When you launch Firefox, the browser immediately establishes a new connection to detectportal.firefox.com. This behavior is caused by Captive Portal, a special feature of Firefox. Here's what is Captive Portal, and how to disable it. Disabling Captive Portal will stop Firefox from connecting to detectportal.firefox.com.

Firefox is a popular web browser with its own rendering engine, which is very rare in the Chromium-based browser world. Since 2017, Firefox has the Quantum engine which comes with a refined user interface, codenamed "Photon". The browser doesn't include support for XUL-based add-ons any more, so all of the classic add-ons are deprecated and incompatible. See Must have add-ons for Firefox Quantum.

Thanks to the changes made to the engine and the UI, the browser is amazingly fast. The user interface of Firefox became more responsive and it also starts up noticeably faster. The engine renders web pages much faster than it ever did in the Gecko era.

The latest version as of today is Firefox 74, check out its change log here.

Captive Portal

Captive Portal in Firefox is a feature that helps the browser to detect if your connection is limited and requires an extra authorization. This is common for hotel wi-fi networks and some other network providers. When the browser is trying to establish a connection to a web site, if it is not authorized via the Captive Portal, the connection is aborted. This means that the browser, or any other app that requires an Internet connection, cannot load the requested web page. The browser establishes connections to the detectportal.firefox.com web site to show an authorization page.

If you use Firefox on your home PC, you may want to disable the captive portal detection feature, and block connection attempts to detectportal.firefox.com​.

To Disable Firefox Captive Portal and Connection to detectportal.firefox.com

1. Open Firefox
2. Type about:config into the address bar.
3. Confirm that you will be careful if you see the warning page.
4. Type network.captive-portal-service.enabled in the search box.
5. Double-click anywhere on the network.captive-portal-service.enabled line in the list of options to set it to false.

You are done.

Note: A value data of True is the default value, means the connection to detectportal.firefox.com​ will be established every time you start Firefox. Also, some users report that Firefox VPN doesn't work properly with network.captive-portal-service.enabled set to false. If you are a Firefox VPN service user, please drop us a comment if changing the option affects the feature.

Tip: In About:Config, you can also set Update captivedetect.canonicalURL to an empty string. You can also add the detectportal.firefox.com domain to your hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1. This will block the connection.

Finally, there are some more domains you may want to add to the hosts file. They are also serve for internal Firefox needs, e.g. for collecting stats and telemetry. They are not required for regular browsing tasks and receiving browser updates. Here is the list:

ostats.mozilla.com
sostats.mozilla.com
metrics.mozilla.com
hardware.metrics.mozilla.com
incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org
crash-stats.mozilla.com
experiments.mozilla.org
getpocket.cdn.mozilla.net
qsurvey.mozilla.com
telemetry.mozilla.org
telemetry-experiment.cdn.mozilla.net
detectportal.firefox.com

That's it.

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