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Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 6 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source | bottom

Hello.

Cloudflare's Browser Intergrity Check/Verification/Challenge feature used by many websites, is denying access to users of non-mainstream browsers like Pale Moon.

Users reports began on January 31:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32045

This situation occurs at least once a year, and there is no easy way to contact Cloudflare. Their "Submit feedback" tool yields no results. A Cloudflare Community topic was flagged as "spam" by members of that community and was promptly locked with no real solution, and no official response from Cloudflare:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/access-denied-to-pale-moo...

Partial list of other browsers that are being denied access:

Falkon, SeaMonkey, IceCat, Basilisk.

Hacker News 2022 post about the same issue, which brought attention and had Cloudflare quickly patching the issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317886

A Cloudflare product manager declared back then: "...we do not want to be in the business of saying one browser is more legitimate than another."

As of now, there is no official response from Cloudflare. Internet access is still denied by their tool.

Show context
zlagen ◴[05 Feb 25 19:35 UTC] No.42953898[source]▶
I'm using chrome on linux and noticed that this year cloudflare is very agressive in showing the "Verify you are a human" box. Now a lot of sites that use cloudflare show it and once you solve the challenge it shows it again after 30 minutes!

What are you protecting cloudflare?

Also they show those captchas when going to robots.txt... unbelievable.

replies(17): >>42954054 #>>42954451 #>>42954784 #>>42954904 #>>42955172 #>>42955240 #>>42955949 #>>42956893 #>>42957248 #>>42957383 #>>42957406 #>>42957408 #>>42957698 #>>42957738 #>>42957782 #>>42958180 #>>42960458 #
1. fcq ◴[05 Feb 25 20:12 UTC] No.42954451[source]▶
I have Firefox and Brave set to always clear cookies and everything when I close the browser... it is a nightmare when I come back the amount of captchas everywhere....

It is either that or keep sending data back to the Meta and Co. overlords despite me not being a Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp user...

replies(2): >>42956668 #>>42957101 #
2. ezfe ◴[05 Feb 25 23:06 UTC] No.42956668[source]▶
You don't need to clear cookies to avoid sending that data back. Just use a browser that properly isolates third party/Facebook cookies.
replies(1): >>42956808 #
3. nacs ◴[05 Feb 25 23:22 UTC] No.42956808[source]▶
You don't even need to use a different browser - Firefox has an official "Multi-account containers" extension that lets you assign certain sites to open in their own sandbox so you can have a sandbox for Google, another for Facebook, etc.
replies(2): >>42957890 #>>42958859 #
4. ATechGuy ◴[05 Feb 25 23:52 UTC] No.42957101[source]▶
I wonder if browsers have a future.
5. onemoresoop ◴[06 Feb 25 01:37 UTC] No.42957890{3}[source]▶
Great idea, I wasn’t even aware and got resigned to the idea tracing is inescapable, but I really need to take that back, even stop using a lot of hostile services. On smartphones it’s even worse.
6. opello ◴[06 Feb 25 03:50 UTC] No.42958859{3}[source]▶
So, what's a good strategy for managing containers? I've used this extension for years, and in the past I was a bit more conservative with my containers (personal, work, google, facebook, twitter, banking, etc.) and now I've gone a bit more ... "ham" as they say ... and I have 29. One example is travel, to keep fare searches from pervading news story ads. But I'm sure there's a way to strike a balance that I've just not yet found.