I recently bought a MacBook Air with Lion. I have had many issues since, especially when connecting to the internet through "open" wifi networks that redirect you to a login page in the browser (i.e., where you need to authenticate in-browser, not through some WEP, WPA or 802.1X thing); what follows has occurred with at least two distinct such networks.
Here's a list of the weird things that happen:
- Can only login to the network using Firefox; not with Safari or Chrome.
- When using Safari or Chrome (after logging in to the network using Firefox), I can only visit fairly "regular" sites; most https services (Gmail, Facebook, …) just won't load.
- Most annoyingly (I could just switch to Firefox to "solve" the above issues), other apps such as Mail.app or Twitter won't work. Mail and Safari even freeze quite often (I need to kill them to quit), and Safari won't even load anymore after being killed – I need to restart the Mac to have it "work" again.
My system is quite new and "clean", although I did copy documents and settings from an older Snow Leopard MacBook. I tried creating a new user to override any non-default settings I might have been using, to no avail.
Any ideas about what's going on?
Best Answer
Make sure you don't have any network proxy settings - you might want to try creating a totally new 'location' in System Preferences -> Networks, select AirPort, click Advanced, then make sure that none of the Proxies are checked.