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.
On one hand, I get the annoying "Verify" box every time I use ChatGPT (and now due its popularity, DeepSeek as well).
On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc.
I honestly don't know what the solution is.
Maybe 10% of the time I make a purchase online, it shows me a screen where it says it's waiting for my bank to verify, I'll have to input a code or accept a notification or something.
A solid half the time it fails. Either the site decides the transaction was rejected before I even get a chance to respond (within seconds), or I just don't get any notification or code or anything, or I do authorize it and it still gets rejected.
But in the US there are so many credit card providers, each one seems to do it differently, and the UX flows just break. And it seems difficult for a site to even test, and how will you even figure out if it's the provider or network or merchant or notification that's failing?
There are several colliding problems there (cheap cell phone plan, 2fa being via text, online purchases requiring 2fa) but it still illustrates to me the pain of doing simple stuff in the modern tech space. I wish the powers that be would work harder on solutions that don't require extra work from the people doing small, normal stuff. It would be better to have a lot more fraud occur but a lot more of the perpetrators pursued and caught. A lot of anti-fraud measures seem to be largely about passing the buck to someone else instead of actually eliminating the humans who are driving the fraud.