On upgrade to Catalina, the captive portal wifi login page no longer appears. Because of this I can no longer connect to public wifi portals.
Steps: Connect to a public wifi
Expected result: Captive network login dialog screen should appear
Actual result: Wifi shows as connected, but no login screen, and no internet access, no DNS resolution, not able to access any IPs on the network
MacBook Pro
This is a bug in macOS Catalina (still present with the latest patchlevel, i.e. 10.15 with the supplemental update from 15th October 2019). For some reason the Captive Portal Assistant (the app that produces the captive portal popup window whenever you connect to a WiFi hotspot) won't start automatically.
There are two workarounds:
option 1: Either you can manually start the Captive Portal Assistant app manually after you have connected to the WiFi network. This will bring up the captive portal popup window and you can unlock Internet access there. (Really no need to boot in recovery mode, etc. !)
option 2: From this blog post: To bring back the captive portal window automatically whenever you connect to a captive portal-protected WiFi network you can create a LaunchDaemon that watches for WiFi changes and automatically opens the Captive Portal Assistant app.
Create a plist file with the service definition somewhere:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" \
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>my.shim.catalina.captivenetworkassistant.plist</string>
<key>LowPriorityIO</key>
<true/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>open</string>
<string>/System/Library/CoreServices/Captive Network Assistant.app</string>
</array>
<key>WatchPaths</key>
<array>
<string>/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
and apply it:
launchctl load my.shim.catalina.captivenetworkassistant.plist
launchctl start my.shim.catalina.captivenetworkassistant
check https://poweruser.blog/macos-catalina-wifi-issue-captive-portal-broken-45610cc016b5 for more details.
I too have this issue !!! After updating to catalina, I am unable to login to my institution wifi. I tried rebooting to safe mode and then the captive portal was open and I could login to college wifi. But as soon as I am back in the normal mode, I am unable to connect to my institution wifi, which makes me crazy... Any helps are most welcome....
This worked for me. I don't know if its permanent or temporary, nor if removing all those launch daemons and agents is a problem. Perhaps one of them is the culprit, but finding out which one would be a challenge.
That's what I did (delete the launch agents and daemons). So far, no problems. However, its possible that some of the apps that depend on these might not return to their most recent state when you open them. Perhaps, they will require you to log in again, or they might return to default settings rather than any custom settings you had.
This solution also worked for me, it's not a perfect solution but it works. Now when I need to login to my captive portal I still receive an error like I'm not connected but if I go to a site I know will trigger the login page (for some reason this is Feedly for me) it pops up in the browser vs when it connected in previous OS versions it would popup in it's own small login screen independent of the browser. I backed up both folders to a temp folder just in case I needed anything, so far Microsoft Office complained about having missing updater files and re-downloaded it's auto updater to fix that issue but otherwise everything is working ok. I hope Apple has a better solution for this soon.
I'm having the same problem on a brand new Macbook Pro I bought last week. Took it to Genius Bar and they couldn't figure it out - said it is likely an "emerging issue" that will get fixed. Their best suggestion was to roll back to Mojave until they release a fix.
Hey I had the same issues!
In my macbook pro 13" 2015 i had just reboot the device and login again and the captive portal magically apperead. It doesn't seem any problem of my app but some "com.apple.services" that doesn't work properly.
For whose that saying that in Windows everything works fine, just google "windows 10 captive portal doesn't appear" and you found out that is a common problem of macOS, Windows, Android, iOS and especially Linux users. Captive portal is probably a smart solution but it is developed not very well in every environment.
One thing I discovered when clearing out the Launch Agents is a number of apps that I no longer use and are not even on my computer. I wonder if any of those were interfering with the Captive Portal popup? But only when coming out of sleep, not from a fresh startup.
This is a known problem with the Sophos Home antivirus software: hthttps://support.home.sophos.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020126572-Captive-Portal-Login-Page-does-not-load-on-MacOS-when-connecting-to-a-Public-Guest-Wi-Fi-Hotspot-.
I've not had a chance yet to test out their workarounds.
The fact that only a guest account (and Safe Mode) strongly implies interference by something that is loaded at login time. Check your Startup Items and Launch Agents for non-Apple software.
You might also try logging in while holding down the Shift key (the login equivalent of booting in Safe Mode) to confirm my hypothesis.
I did not have anything listed under my Login Items for my user profile. So I removed the several files in LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons and rebooted. The captive window finally appeared. Now I had to approve a GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle program to run (which I'm assuming is what keeps Chrome updated). I'm hoping it wasn't that which was preventing the captive window but from one of the other files I removed.
Same problem here. Mojave works. iOS works. Catalina does not work. I reboot into safe mode, get the captive dialog and connect, and then reboot again and everything works.
It worked fine prior to the upgrade. I have raised a bug report.
There's a bug in macOS Catalina that in some cases seems to prevents that the WiFi login webpage (captive portal) never appears.
Workaround:
1.) connect to the WiFi
2.) open this app: /System/Library/CoreServices/Captive Network Assistant.app
the WiFi login page should now appear (if not, disable and re-enable WiFi and try again).
Also see here for a fix how to bring back the WiFi login window automatically:
https://poweruser.blog/macos-catalina-wifi-issue-captive-portal-broken-45610cc016b5
I can reach hotspot login page using Safari trying to access a HTTP address when I login with a non-admin user. If user is admin, Safari can't reach the hotspot login page. If the URL is HTTPS, Safari can't help as well.
The only thing that really fixed it for me was to remove all .plist files from /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons directories.
Of course it caused me some trouble and I needed to reinstall some softwares after that, but it really got the issue fixed :/
type in the url for login into a browser. It will say "no internet". Now, log out of the system. Tick the box which says reopen windows when logging back in. Log back in, now the browser url should load. Sometimes, i have to log in and out 2 times in a row to get it to work. I know that this is not a good solution, but i thought i might as well take some time out of my day to write this since i've read some of the users rebooting to fix this issue( consumes more time than log out/in).
wifi not working - captive portal login screen does not appear
