←back to thread

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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source

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.

1. trod1234 ◴[05 Feb 25 23:55 UTC] No.42957127[source]▶
This situation has been repeatedly happening multiple times a year. Its an ongoing battle where Cloudflare exploits their monopoly on the web to break the web for any unfavored browser.

The fact that its regressed and repeated so many times now that clearly it indicates a trend and pattern of abuse by malicious intention. Change management isn't hard, unit tests are not hard, consistently breaking only certain browsers seems targeted.

Notably there are mainstream browsers that have this problem as well. Mozilla Firefox for example. Their Challenge has broken large swathes of the web many times to the point where companies hosting apps and websites have simply said they will not support any browser other than Google Chrome/Edge.

Anytime the market gets sieved and pushed to only one single solution, its because someone is doing it for their benefit to everyone elses loss.

Cloudflare should be broken up in antitrust as a monopoly, as should Google.