Add a policy option for users who need captive portals on chromium [Feature Request]

[NomadicUser]

Despite after making sure my keyring was unlocked (the annoying popup for chrome browsers) on linux. I was not able to connect to any public WiFi captive portals I tested. This is unrelated to the fact that most places in the US use AT&T as their provider. I looked into this and captive portals are almost always over a http not https. Chromium forces handling of http to upgrade to https and many users report this issue.

I proceeded to create a global policy and it fixed the issue for me:

{
  "BasicAuthOverHttpEnabled": true,
  "HttpsUpgradesEnabled": false
}

HttpsUpgradesEnabled may not need to be set I didn't try without it but BasicAuthOverHttpEnabled most certainly needs to be set to even reach captive portals.

Chrome 154 will set HTTPS by default which I bet will lead to more people having this issue. Currently though the default chrome settings disallows Basic Authentication dialogs on plain HTTP which almost most public captive portal gateways use. The second is chrome automatically upgrades any http:// request to https:// before sending it by default.

The global policy directory for all users is /etc/chromium/policies/managed/ and chrome supports multiple policy files in the directory.

Any JSON files placed there are read and merged together, so you can split your configuration across multiple policy files if that makes management easier.

This makes it easy if more such "Enterprise Policy" options were added to browser choice in the future:

/etc/chromium/policies/managed/
├── 01_browser-choice_captive-portal-policy.json
└── 02‑homepage‑policy.json

Summery

• Please add a check box option for Brave Browser and Chromium to create a Enterprise policy at install.

- **Enterprise Policies:**

[ ] Enable access to Captive Portals (Public WiFi)

[adrelanos]

Not something browser-choice should do. It doesn't modify browsers. By design.