I have a problem when my mobile device signs into its main WiFi provider. If anyone knows Virgin Media's wifi service, that's the provider, but the problem is probably generic and could affect almost any wifi device using captive portal.
I use Firefox Mobile. When I get in range of WiFi, I get the "sign in for your wifi" notification. I click it, and a tab opens in the browser with the Wifi providers initial splash page, at which point I'm logged in via cookies, and can close the tab.
I don't mind the splash page so much. The problem is that the splash page overwrites my most recently open Firefox tab when it loads, and not just that, the entire tab I was viewing and its history and form content (for posts I'm writing) is completely lost. I guess it's doing a redirect, a script that write()s, or a META REFRESH but not sure which. I also don't know if the problem is because of an issue with the notification/intent, or the HTML page/HTTP headers.
Everything else that launches a browser page seems to play nice and opens in a new tab so the device and browser is working fine. It's just this one situation where I regularly lose tabs I've found and was reading, or writing posts on. It's so annoying.
What can I do to stop this happening? More generally how can the tab's whole history be wiped by content loading? Surely it shouldn't be!