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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 1 comments | 2/5/2025, 7:08:00 PM | HN request time: 0.377s | 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
tibbar ◴[2/5/2025, 9:12:00 PM] No.42955200[source]▶

This echoes the user agent checking that was prevalent in past times. Websites would limit features and sometimes refuse to render for the "wrong" browser, even if that browser had the ability to display the website just fine. So browsers started pretending to be other browsers in their user agents. Case in point - my Chrome browser, running on an M3 mac, has the following user agent:

"'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'"

That means my browser is pretending to be Firefox AND Safari on an Intel chip.

I don't know what features Cloudflare uses to determine what browser you're on, or if perhaps it's sophisticated enough to get past the user agent spoofing, but it's all rather funny and reminiscent just the same.

replies(7): >>42955304 #>>42955320 #>>42956442 #>>42959877 #>>42961242 #>>42963248 #>>42965661 #
gloosx ◴[2/6/2025, 7:07:00 AM] No.42959877[source]▶

I'm still using Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 on my desktop.

The internet is so much better like this! There is a 2010 lightweight mobile version of Google, and m.youtube with obviously cleaner and better UI and not a single ad (apparently it's not worth to show you ads if you still appear to be using iphone 6)

replies(3): >>42966197 #>>42967040 #>>42974990 #
hexagonwin ◴[2/6/2025, 10:12:00 PM] No.42967040[source]▶

This is iOS 6 and not iPhone 6, btw.

replies(1): >>42969719 #
1. gloosx ◴[2/7/2025, 5:27:00 AM] No.42969719[source]▶

Whoa, really. So it is even back to 3GS/4 days then.