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Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

lwthiker.com

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Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#131

Post by Barrin92 »

detritus wrote: post #24
Aachen wrote: post #2

I mean, with that market share, popularity among open source fans... it's an easy group to target and filter oddballs. I'm a Firefox user and I'm used to this treatment at every step of the way, no matter if it's about software, airports, opening a bank account so I can receive a salary, etc. Fundamental things everyone wants to do are being made hard to do the right way. It's always anti privacy, anti self repair, a…

Really? I'm a firefox user too and whilst I occasionally bump into some situation as you describe where I need to hop onto Chrome, I genuinely can't remember the last time this happened. Nope, actually - sometime last year, with some poorly-coded gig ticket purchase thing, if I remember right. I was able to check the code and amend some stupid niggle in WebDev tools to get around it. Not saying I should have to accep…

Just in the last month Firefox didn't work for me on my health insurer's site, my bank's site as well as when trying to request a mail-in ballot for a regional election. Obviously not Mozilla's fault, but for me at this point the browser isn't that usable any more because that's important services I need to have access to.

On large international sites the likelihood that Firefox works flawlessly is pretty high. But a lot of regional service providers appear to kind of have given up on it.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#132

Post by tyingq »

prdonahue wrote: post #100

(I’m responsible for Cloudflare’s L7 security products) While we can’t comment on the specifics of any customer configuration, we do not block or challenge Firefox by default—either with our Bot Management products or with any other L7 security controls. You can confirm this by signing up a free zone and making a request from Firefox.

You're saying there's not a simplistic "block Firefox rule" right? But, the user agent is surely one of the weighted features going into your ML stew. So it's plausible the poster is seeing that Firefox sends some calculation over the edge and causes blocking for them.

That is, you're not saying "Firefox doesn't change the scoring at all", right?

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#133

Post by CamperBob2 »

This business of flagging legitimate downloads as "suspicious" is getting way out of hand. Here's what I'm dealing with lately:

https://i.imgur.com/ZzExHt2.png

This setup program is signed with an EV certificate from DigiCert and hosted on an https site. No other hoops left to jump through except this awesome Catch-22 implementation, which leaves no actionable solution.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#134

Post by pmontra »

lwthiker wrote: post #93
detritus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I'm a firefox user too and whilst I occasionally bump into some situation as you describe where I need to hop onto Chrome, I genuinely can't remember the last time this happened. Nope, actually - sometime last year, with some poorly-coded gig ticket purchase thing, if I remember right. I was able to check the code and amend some stupid niggle in WebDev tools to get around it. Not saying I should have to accep…

For a while now I can't even access WhatsApp Web [1] through Firefox. It gets stuck on the loading page and keeps refreshing itself forever. I have to resort to Chrome whenever I need WhatsApp on my laptop. [1] https://web.whatsapp.com

I don't think I can be of much help but WhatsApp web has been working for me on Ubuntu with all Firefox versions since WhatsApp web has been a thing. Did you try to start Firefox in safe mode, no addons and/or a fresh profile?

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#135

Post by CamperBob2 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #108
Aachen wrote: post #2

I mean, with that market share, popularity among open source fans... it's an easy group to target and filter oddballs. I'm a Firefox user and I'm used to this treatment at every step of the way, no matter if it's about software, airports, opening a bank account so I can receive a salary, etc. Fundamental things everyone wants to do are being made hard to do the right way. It's always anti privacy, anti self repair, a…

I don't even have chrome installed and never need it to be honest. Except for some boneheaded sites that refuse FF entirely ( https://business.apple.com is such an offender) I don't have issues with sites not working. Edit: it looks like even Apple has got their act together now, it seems to support Firefox now too. Finally

I just followed your link and it says, "Your browser is not supported. We recommend using the latest version of Safari, Microsoft Edge, or Chrome."

So apparently Firefox is subversive and scary enough to make Apple refer me to Microsoft or Google to avoid it. I guess that's what passes for "Think Different" at Apple these days.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#137

Post by shadowgovt »

robonerd wrote: post #76
dingleberry420 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so you accepted that your website was broken. That can be a valid business decision, but that doesn't not make it broken. Try this analogy: Most people have functional legs, so why install a ramp? 99% of your users can access your property, so who cares, right?

It seems as though capitalism has little room for craftsmanship as a virtue. The only value becomes the dollar value, people see no shame in shoddy workmanship so long as it's profitable.

The way I see it, Firefox's reputation for craftsmanship is unearned. The only time it crosses my desk as a site developer is people filing browser-specific bug reports for it. Its engine does not, in general, benchmark as performant as either Chrome's or Safari's on our site. It's certainly not beating them by enough percentage points for me to suggest people switch to it for performance.

Mozilla has had more time to work on this problem space than their competitors, and they don't have the technical advantage to show for it. They may have been the technologically better choice in the Browser Wars era of Internet Explorer, but nowadays? They're falling down on the technical merits, not just the network effects.

It's free and it's widely available. If they were better than the alternatives more people would switch to them but they're not.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#138

Post by webmobdev »

rezonant wrote: post #25

This is almost certainly a firewall rule put in place by the operators of that site. My own sites which are protected with Cloudflare do not exhibit this behavior when using Firefox.

Privacy preserving extensions like uBlock Origin, Canvas Blocker, Decentraleyes etc. used in Firefox also trigger the CloudFlare wall of harassment. Some of the actions of these extensions prevent browser fingerprinting and CloudFlare gets easily confused when this happens and unnecessarily triggers a lot of challenges for a user. You can easily get sucked into the blackhole of captchas - sometimes even solving 5+ captchas isn't enough to convince them that you are a real human.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#139

Post by mynameisvlad »

samhw wrote: post #127
robonerd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean Hanlon's razor, but that adage is a farce. Every scoundrel in the world knows the trick of pretending it was all a mistake. Skepticism is warranted.

I can't see why Occam's razor wouldn't apply: don't postulate more entities than are necessary to explain the facts. Specifically, there is no reason to postulate some kind of anti-Firefox elements within Cloudflare when it's simply explainable as a mistake . (There's a reason Hanlon's razor was given that name, I'm pretty sure, and that's because it's not too dissimilar from – essentially it's a much-more-situation-…

^ This. The simplest explanation is generally the most correct.
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