wifi not working - captive portal login screen does not appear

None of the solutions have worked for me. I don’t know why Apple calls them updates, between this and Music not working on my iPad after the “Update” I’m ready to jump ship. I often travel and am now in a hotel room and can’t get internet on my MacBook...which I need for work.

This sounds to me like there is something third-party (e.g., automatic VPN protection, some kind of third-party firewall, over-zealous AV) that is getting in the way. I’ve had issues with VPN in the past, and found that temporarily disabling it (until I get through the captive portal) solved it for me — and is a heck of a lot easier than rebooting into Safe Mode!

I will agree, the only way I've been able to get this to work is to connect to the public wifi (which technically connects but can't login because captive portal doesn't load), and then reboot. Upon reboot, as long as the computer reconnects immediately to the same public wifi, it will pop up with a captive portal. What the heck?!

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