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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 4 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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.

Show context
nikkwong ◴[06 Feb 25 05:13 UTC] No.42959315[source]▶
Yesterday I was attempting to buy a product on a small retailer's website—as soon as I hit the "add to cart" button I got a message from Cloudflare: "Sorry, you have been blocked". My only recourse was to message the owner of the domain asking them to unblock me. Of course, I didn't, and decided to buy the product elsewhere. I wasn't doing anything suspicious.. using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits.

Not sure if this problem is common but; I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures. I would hope the cost to retailers is trivial in this case, I guess the upside of blocking automated traffic can be quite great.

Just checked again and I'm still blocked on the website. Hopefully this kind of thing gets sorted out.

replies(13): >>42959473 #>>42959512 #>>42960071 #>>42960395 #>>42960397 #>>42961792 #>>42961906 #>>42964337 #>>42964617 #>>42965068 #>>42965688 #>>42965889 #>>42970070 #
jen729w ◴[06 Feb 25 08:46 UTC] No.42960397[source]▶
Vendors who block iCloud Relay are the worst. I'm sure they don't even know they're doing it. But some significant percentage of Apple users -- and you'd have to think it's only gonna grow -- comes from those IP address ranges.

Bad business, guys. You gotta find another way. Blocking IP addresses is o-ver.

replies(6): >>42960506 #>>42962582 #>>42962962 #>>42963465 #>>42963466 #>>42963720 #
cprecioso ◴[06 Feb 25 09:03 UTC] No.42960506[source]▶
This would be weird, esp. given that Cloudflare is one of the vendors who act as exit nodes for iCloud Relay.
replies(2): >>42960816 #>>42962833 #
latexr ◴[06 Feb 25 09:56 UTC] No.42960816[source]▶
I believe your parent comment means when the target website blocks, not Cloudflare.

YouTube is a perfect example. Using iCloud Private Relay can now frequently label you as a bot, which stops you from watching videos until you login.

replies(2): >>42961119 #>>42961696 #
1. tessela ◴[06 Feb 25 12:25 UTC] No.42961696[source]▶
It happens to me a lot, I just created a small automation to use https://cobalt.tools to download the content. Their loss, not mine.
replies(3): >>42961813 #>>42962483 #>>42963798 #
2. egberts1 ◴[06 Feb 25 12:44 UTC] No.42961813[source]▶
Nice tool.
3. latexr ◴[06 Feb 25 14:12 UTC] No.42962483[source]▶
I do something similar. Over 90% of my YouTube consumption is with Alfred workflows which use mpv and yt-dlp under the hood. I just press a keyboard shortcut and the frontmost tab closes in the browser and starts playing in mpv.

The remaining percentage is still annoying, as it happens from the phone.

4. ir77 ◴[06 Feb 25 16:13 UTC] No.42963798[source]▶
why is your tool so hard to use on ios? the website instructions say you need a companion siri shortcut, but no where is there actually a shortcut listed.

combing and coming through searches and reddit all comes up with non-working siri shortcuts that complain that the url is not found.