Prisma Browser provides a captive portal experience that maintains security posture while giving users a reliable way to connect to networks that require sign-in. The browser aims to deliver a seamless captive portal experience and enforce enterprise-grade security controls. It replicates familiar browser behaviors where possible but introduces additional safeguards to prevent policy bypass in untrusted network states.

When a device connects to a new network (for example, public Wi-Fi), most browsers and operating systems try to detect captive portals by performing lightweight connectivity checks (e.g., http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204).

If the request is redirected instead of returning a “no content” (HTTP 204) response, the browser infers that a captive portal is present. It then opens a Wi-Fi sign-in window automatically to direct the user to authenticate or accept terms. Once authenticated, the connection becomes unrestricted and normal browsing resumes.

In some cases, the automatic captive portal detection flow is not sufficient.

Common recovery actions include:

• Manually visiting known captive portal domains (for example, wifi.airline.com).
• Navigating to a popular website (for example, example.com) to trigger a redirection from the default gateway.