←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: 0.206s | 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 #
taurknaut ◴[06 Feb 25 07:43 UTC] No.42960071[source]▶
> using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits.

Well i've certainly never heard of this browser before and it still seems pretty young. I'd guess it's the same issue.

replies(4): >>42960105 #>>42960119 #>>42960456 #>>42961276 #
chrisandchris ◴[06 Feb 25 08:53 UTC] No.42960456[source]▶
I'm still not sure how some random browser should result in a block by the provider. I don't think there's any security risk for the provider of the site by using an outdated browser. Blocking malicious IPs yes/maybe, blocking suspicious acitivity maybe. But because you have browser X - please not.

This is going to lead two a two-class internet where new technologies will not emerge and big players will win because the gate the high is so absurdly high and random that people stop to invent.

replies(1): >>42961108 #
taurknaut ◴[06 Feb 25 10:49 UTC] No.42961108[source]▶
I presume this was not intentional.
replies(1): >>42963008 #
1. anonym29 ◴[06 Feb 25 15:02 UTC] No.42963008[source]▶
One cannot assume a problem is minor, rare, unimportant, or easy to fix purely on the basis of it being unintentional.

Consider automobile accidents.