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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried spoofing Safari's and Chrome's User-Agent string in Firefox and business.apple.com still blocks me because I'm not using a real Safari or Chrome. So they appear to be using feature detection of some API that's not available in Firefox. I see that the site also blocks Apple's own Safari browser on iOS.

Looks like this site was been blocking Firefox users since at least 2018, according to the bug report on Mozilla's webcompat.com issue tracker:

https://webcompat.com/issues/18964

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#152
post #84

We're regressing to a state reminiscent of the dark IE years. Except back then when you suggested alternative browsers, people were generally receptive once they saw the practical utility of features like tabs. Now when you suggest alternative browsers, people complain about tens of milliseconds more latency and insist on using Chrome for the speed. It's hard to blame them though, since the practical advantages of Fi…

That ship sailed when developers collectively decided that browsers should be complete reimplementations of the entire operating system, and anything less was hopelessly broken. With a barrier to entry so high that trillion dollar companies don't find it worth the investment, it's no surprise that the last independent implementation is struggling to keep up.

when developers collectively decided

Based entirely on propaganda from the one company that is rapidly taking control of the whole Internet.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#153
Considering CDN's are duplicates of websites located around the world to remove lag, has anyone every flagged up how CDN's can be used for nefarious means, or do people just trust CDN's blindly? When is a sock puppet not an avatar on a web forum but an entire website radicalising individuals in secret?

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#154
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that definition is right, but only where 'simplest' factors in the probability of each premiss, not just the aggregate number of premisses. And yeah, on that reading it's trivially true, but something's being trivially true doesn't mean humans as psychological beings don't need reminding of it.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to trust a whole lot of companies to get onto and use the Internet. Obviously, I wouldn't dream of asserting otherwise. My point is that for the vast majority of the population, a paragraph of technogibberish about cryptography doesn't fundamentally change anything, you're still reliant on trust. To most people, that paragraph is worth about as much as a basic promise. The worth of that statement is derive…

That extends to pointing out that trust is required. When it's the default state of things, what use is pointing it out going to bring? I made an obvious point because it's strange to bring up that something on the internet requires trust. Because of course it does.

It's the difference between trusting some math that's used by a hundred million sites versus trusting math that one particular company claims is safe.

It's not strange at all to distinguish between those kinds of trust.

When I use TLS 1.3, I'm not relying on "trust us" from the inventor and a couple investigators, I'm relying on heavy worldwide scrutiny.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#156

Nope. Individual customer setting, not a Cloudflare policy. We work closely with the Firefox team on many projects.

Aren't you not supposed to comment on individual customers?

They aren't, they're commenting on company general policy and making the obvious deduction from that.

It's (literally) basic logic

1. Some site flags Firefox. 2. Not all sites flag Firefox. 3. Either every site flags Firefox or individual sites flag Firefox. 4. It is not true that every site flags Firefox (obverse of 2) C. Individual sites flag Firefox (disjunction with 3, 4)

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#157
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Firefox and Mozilla for what, 20 years? And I've never bumped into a situation like this. Some very clearly shit internal IT systems had pathetic IE requirements, but never one that said sorry go get chrome

They don't always say "go get chrome" but one example that still happens to me is logging in to Outlook email at work, if I use Firefox I get a hobbled "basic HTML" interface, if I masquerade as Chrome on Windows I get the full UI and it all works perfectly. Google drive is another one, where some things stop working depending on the user agent I'm presenting.

Microsoft Teams also does this. Google meet used to do it too.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#158

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…

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. Sadly I find it happens more and more often, even with important things like financial services. What I haven't figured out yet is whether it's really the Firefox engine that is the problem or just that Firefox also provides better tools for…

What I find most common is that the website has arbitrarily blocked firefox based on the user agent. The site works fine if you tell it you're using Chrome, so it's neither an engine nor a tracking issue.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the speculation, but using Firefox does not increase your likelihood of being flagged as a bot nor does it increase your threat score.

Care to back that up with data? The link above is demonstrating the opposite.

No post body was provided.

Re: Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

#160

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.

Is there a meme like name along the lines of "self-own" when you go online and have a tantrum about someone doing something to you only to find out it's your own doing that caused the issue?
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