If you are connecting to WiFi with a "captive portal" visit a site that does not use https by default. News sites are a decent choice, I tend to use http://www.bbc.com or http://cnn.com

It is not possible or safe for Firefox to ignore this issue. The best it can do is to detect that you are on a captive portal, pause tab loading and open a new tab to reach the captive portal login/authorization page. This is being added to desktop Firefox soon, depending on how the change was made Firefox for Android may get the feature for free.

Thanks for the reply. The issue with, e. g. coffee shop wifi, is that it will not let me connect to anything, http or https, without first connecting to the portal. I can choose not to connect to the portal, of course, but then I am using my data plan, which again defeats the purpose of connecting to public wifi. So there is no other solution ? Why is it ok for desktop Firefox to allow for exceptions but not Android ?

Actually, much to my surprise, this worked; thank you, and apologies for the earlier post. I had had the home page set to google and did not realize the https: status did make a difference to the initial connection, for Firefox if not for the other browsers. As soon as I set the home page, as you suggested, to a news site, it worked fine (had to go out and test it at the coffee shop to make sure !) Other difference between Firefox and the other browsers on startup is that the application needs to be completely closed beforehand in order to try to connect to the home page on startup. With Chrome, for example, it is only necessary that no Chrome browser windows be open. Thanks for the help Charles