Free Wi-Fi annoyances
Some people might think that I’m crazy for complaining about free services, but squeaky wheels get grease, and I truly believe that these wheels need greasing.
Most free Wi-Fi hotspots require accepting a EULA before they can be used, and they usually accomplish this by intercepting a user’s first attempt to view a web page and by showing a web page with their EULA form instead. This isn’t so unreasonable, but pretty much every EULA page that I’ve seen sucks.
- EULA requirements disrupt service. While most Internet traffic involves the web, there are still other protocols that aren’t uncommon. Some Wi-Fi hotspots block all traffic until the EULA is accepted, but this means that things such as email and instant messaging applications can fail without providing any explanation why. Admittedly, I don’t think that this is fully the fault of the hotspots themselves since they can’t control the error messages (or the lack of them) in the individual applications. Perhaps some standardization effort is warranted here.
- Most EULA pages are not designed for mobile devices with small screens. Free Wi-Fi hotspots might have been predominantly used by laptops not so long ago, but smartphones with Wi-Fi are becoming increasingly prevalent. At least on my Palm Pre, I almost always have to zoom in and to do a lot of scrolling to find the checkbox or button to accept the EULA, and then I have to zoom in some more so that it’s big enough to tap on.
- Most EULA pages don’t automatically redirect to the original destination. If I go through the effort to type out a web page address on my tiny keyboard only to be redirected to a EULA page, at least redirect me to my original destination after I accept the EULA. Don’t make me type out the address again.
In some cases, free Wi-Fi hotspots actually do me more harm than good. Since I have an unlimited data service through Sprint, if my phone suddenly decides to use a free Wi-Fi hotspot instead of my cellular data service, I suddenly have to deal with all of the EULA nonsense (or, as mentioned before, things just start mysteriously failing).
Unfortunately, there aren’t strong economic incentives to fix issues with free things. Alas.
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whine whine.
on the small screens issue, you just need an iphone. it handles most of them pretty well (much of the time automatically). in fact, according to jobs when the first iphone came out, the reason they put so much effort into the browswr was because they wanted people to be able to access wifi to download music anywhere.
i do agree that they can be annoyances when I find myself re-opening my browser, which tries to reload my 50 pages that i have open, and all of them re-direct. fortunately, chrome recovers from that pretty well. once i log in, and I can close and re-open chrome and it finds the right page. in older versions, it just re-opened 50 versions of the EULA page.
and yeah, on the more harm than good, I agree. that’s why I mostly just don’t log into unknown wifi networks. problem solved
— Ben @ December 31, 2010, 8:53 pm (PT)
Regarding the iPhone: I’m not sure what the iPhone web browser could actively be doing to make things better without also breaking layouts to other pages, although I would guess that a number of EULA pages specifically detect the iPhone user-agent and use the <meta name=”viewport” …> tag only for them but not for other mobile browsers (or simply unconditionally since desktop browsers would just ignore it).
BTW, the BarTab extension for Firefox trumps Chrome for the EULA situation since it loads tabs lazily.
The don’t-log-into-unknown-WiFi-networks thing is something that I usually try to do, but occasionally I do find myself somewhere with poor reception and don’t have a choice.
— James @ December 31, 2010, 9:09 pm (PT)
I agree, but:
– Windows 7 and recent versions of iOS (I think 3 and 4) have some way of detecting a hotspot that requires some kind of human interaction for a EULA for whatever, and will just jump right to this, for many (but not all) hotspots. Dunno how they detect this; maybe they check if someknownserver.{microsoft,apple}.com resolves to some sentinel value in DNS and if it resolves to the gateway then they’re on one of these hotspots. That somewhat addresses the disrupt-service point.
– I never turn on the “join all networks automatically” setting, which mostly addresses your last point. Of course, if you join a EULA-requiring hotspot then leave then come back, your phone will auto-rejoin it. I don’t really have this problem with the Pre since I don’t join hotspot networks where there’s Sprint service. (iPhone users on AT&T are still screwed since they need every ounce of hotspot they can get.)
— Matt @ January 2, 2011, 7:26 pm (PT)