What i would love to see is a simple browser. At some wifi hotspots it is necessary to login via a captive portal.

You're right. A lot of hotspots require a browser to log in and that's an issue for us. I'm not sure if a simple browser could do it, though. It depends on how those providers manage access. Is it typically a cookie? IP address? MAC? Does HTTPS or javascript typically need to be involved? I don't currently know. It might not be as simple as loading a page and POSTing a response. Even my Linux laptop sometimes has trouble with certain hotspots, I guess since they really only expect Windows, Android, and Apple devices.

Do you know how it typically works? I'm guessing it's not even standard. and details on how hotspot service is implemented generally isn't available on most of the provider's websites so we would need to go out and manually observe.

Anyway, it's something we want to solve if we can. Even if a minimal browser only helps in 80% of the situations it would probably be worth trying.

Not sure how we could render the HTML, other than ignoring most markup. I think the absolute minimum needed might be some way to display the text of the page, need to preserve and interpret the form correctly, and need to be able to POST a response based on form data. And that's only if authentication is IP or MAC based, and no HTTPS or fancy javascript is required for understanding the page.

You're right. There are a lot of different implementations. I think the most common is a captive portal with a simple form for login and/or tos agreement. The mac is then unblocked in the firewall of the access point for a certain time period.

I think i will start by collecting data of different captive portals to see how it is done and what a browser would need to support.