Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 554 posts

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

#121

Post by Hold-And-Modify »

jeroenhd wrote: post #111

I just downloaded Palemoon to check and it seems the CAPTCHA straight up crashes. Once it crashes, reloading the page no longer shows the CAPTCHA so it did pass something at least. I tried another Cloudflare turnstile but the entire browser crashed on a segfault, and ever since the CAPTCHAs don't seem to come up again. ChatGPT.com is normally quite useful for generating Cloudflare prompts, but that page doesn't seem…

This crash is an even newer Cloudflare issue (as of yesterday, I believe). It is not related to the one discussed here, and will be solved in the next browser update:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32064

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

#122

Post by LeoPanthera »

Blocking Falkon is especially egregious if they're not also blocking Gnome Web. Those are the default browsers for Plasma and Gnome respectively, and some of the few browsers left that are "just browsers", with no phoning home or any kind of cloud integration.

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

#123

Post by jeroenhd »

inetknght wrote: post #94
windsignaling wrote: post #72

As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this. 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.

> On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc. Yup! > I honestly don't know what the solution is. Force law enforcement to enforce the laws. Or else, block the countries that don't combat fraud. That means... China? Hey isn't there a "trade war" being "started"? It sure would be fortunate if China (and certain o…

A lot of the fake browser traffic I'm seeing is coming from American data centres. China plays a major part, but if we're going by bot traffic, America will end up on the ban list pretty quickly.

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

#124

Post by stevenAthompson »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93
windsignaling wrote: post #72

As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this. 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.

Simple: We need to acknowledge that the vision of a decentralized internet as it was implemented was a complete failure, is dying, and will probably never return. Robots went out of control, whether malicious or the AI scrapers or the Clearview surveillance kind; users learned to not trust random websites; SEO spam ruined search, the only thing that made a decentralized internet navigable; nation state attacks became…

I hate that you're right.

To make matters worse, I suspect that not even a splinternet can save it. It needs a new foundation, preferably one that wasn't largely designed before security was a thing.

Federation is probably a good start, but it should be federated well below the application layer.

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

#125

Post by jacobr1 »

inetknght wrote: post #94
windsignaling wrote: post #72

As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this. 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.

> On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc. Yup! > I honestly don't know what the solution is. Force law enforcement to enforce the laws. Or else, block the countries that don't combat fraud. That means... China? Hey isn't there a "trade war" being "started"? It sure would be fortunate if China (and certain o…

Slightly more complicated because a ton of the abuse comes from IPs located western countries, explicitly to evade fraud and abuse detection. Now you can go after the western owners of those systems (and all the big ones do have have large abuse teams to handle reports) but enforcement has a much higher latency. To be effective you would need a much more aggressive system. Stronger KYC. Changes in laws to allow for less due-process and more "guilty by default" type systems that you then need to prove innocence to rebut.

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

#126

Post by megous »

slothsarecool wrote: post #54

Cloudflare is actually pretty upfront about which browsers they support. You can find the whole list right in their developer docs. This isn't some secret they're trying to hide from website owners or users - it's right here https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/reference/cloudflare-c... - My guess is that there is no response because not one of the browsers you listed is supported. Think about it this way: when a fr…

They do not support major browsers. They support "major browsers in default configuration without any extensions" (which is of course ridiculous proposition), forcing people to either abandon any privacy/security preserving measures they use, or to abandon the websites covered by CF.

I use uptodate Firefox, and was blocked from using company gitlab for months on end simply because I disabled some useless new web API in about:config way before CF started silently requiring it without any feature testing or meningful error message for the user. Just a redirect loop. Gitlab support forum was completely useless for this, just blaming the user.

So we dropped gitlab at the company and went with basic git over https hosting + cgit, rather than pay some company that will happily block us via some user hostile intermediary without any resolution. I figured out what was "wrong" (lack of feature testing for web API features CF uses, and lack of meaningful error message feedback to the user) after the move.

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

#127

Post by wongarsu »

tibbar wrote: post #51

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…

They are pretending to be an ancient Mozilla version from the time after Netscape but before Firefox, KHTML (which was forked to webkit), Firefox (Gecko engine), Chrome and Safari. The only piece of browser history it's missing is somehow pretending to be IE.

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

#129

Post by lynndotpy »

windsignaling wrote: post #72

As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this. 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.

> 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.

The solution is good security-- Cloudflare only cuts down on the noise. I'm looking at junk requests and hacking attempts flow through to my sites as we speak.

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

#130

Post by Aeolun »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93
windsignaling wrote: post #72

As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this. 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.

Simple: We need to acknowledge that the vision of a decentralized internet as it was implemented was a complete failure, is dying, and will probably never return. Robots went out of control, whether malicious or the AI scrapers or the Clearview surveillance kind; users learned to not trust random websites; SEO spam ruined search, the only thing that made a decentralized internet navigable; nation state attacks became…

The great firewall, but in reverse.
Post reply on HN