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

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

#161

Post by zzo38computer »

megous wrote: post #126
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…

Although I sometimes have problems with Cloudflare, it does not seem to affect GitHub nor Gitlab for me, although they have other problems, which I have been able to work around.

Some things that I had found helpful when working with Gitlab is to add ".patch" on the end of commit URLs, and changing "blob" to "raw" in file URLs. (This works on GitHub as well.) It is also possible to use API, and sometimes the data can be found within the HTML the server sends to you without needing any additional requests (this seems to work on GitHub more reliably than on Gitlab though).

You could also clone the repository into your own computer in order to see the files (and then use the git command line to send any changes you make to the server), but that does not include issue tracker etc, and you might not want all of the files anyways, if the repository has a lot of files.

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

#162

Post by alexjplant »

benbristow wrote: post #154
zlagen wrote: post #5

I'm using chrome on linux and noticed that this year cloudflare is very agressive in showing the "Verify you are a human" box. Now a lot of sites that use cloudflare show it and once you solve the challenge it shows it again after 30 minutes! What are you protecting cloudflare? Also they show those captchas when going to robots.txt... unbelievable.

They usually protect the whole DNS record so it makes sense it would cover robots.txt as well, even if it's a bit silly.

They run their own DNS infra so that when you set the SOA for your zone to their servers they can decide what to resolve to. If you have protection set on a specific record then it resolves to a fleet of nginx servers with a bunch of special sauce that does the reverse proxying that allows for WAF, caching, anti-DDoS, etc. It's entirely feasible for them to exempt specific requests like this one since they aren't "protect[ing] the whole DNS" so much as using it to facilitate control of the entire HTTP request/response.

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

#164

Post by zinekeller »

nerdralph wrote: post #112
progmetaldev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's the customers I deal with, or my own ignorance, but what alternatives are there to a service like Cloudflare? It is very easy to setup, and my clients don't want to pay a lot of money for hosting. With Cloudflare, I can turn on DDoS and bot protection to prevent heavy resource usage, as well as turn on caching to keep resource usage down. I built a plugin for the CMS I use (Umbraco - runs on .NET) to clear…

What's the cost of annoying people trying to browse to your sites, some to the point where they'll just not bother?

This is rather blunt, but if it is between 98% (CF-protected) versus near-0% (heavily-DDoSed site), then you hopefully you now see the dilemma that other people faced.

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

#165

Post by ATechGuy »

fcq wrote: post #10
zlagen wrote: post #5

I'm using chrome on linux and noticed that this year cloudflare is very agressive in showing the "Verify you are a human" box. Now a lot of sites that use cloudflare show it and once you solve the challenge it shows it again after 30 minutes! What are you protecting cloudflare? Also they show those captchas when going to robots.txt... unbelievable.

I have Firefox and Brave set to always clear cookies and everything when I close the browser... it is a nightmare when I come back the amount of captchas everywhere.... It is either that or keep sending data back to the Meta and Co. overlords despite me not being a Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp user...

I wonder if browsers have a future.

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

#166

Post by trod1234 »

This situation has been repeatedly happening multiple times a year. Its an ongoing battle where Cloudflare exploits their monopoly on the web to break the web for any unfavored browser.

The fact that its regressed and repeated so many times now that clearly it indicates a trend and pattern of abuse by malicious intention. Change management isn't hard, unit tests are not hard, consistently breaking only certain browsers seems targeted.

Notably there are mainstream browsers that have this problem as well. Mozilla Firefox for example. Their Challenge has broken large swathes of the web many times to the point where companies hosting apps and websites have simply said they will not support any browser other than Google Chrome/Edge.

Anytime the market gets sieved and pushed to only one single solution, its because someone is doing it for their benefit to everyone elses loss.

Cloudflare should be broken up in antitrust as a monopoly, as should Google.

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

#167

Post by ohcmon »

rozap wrote: post #109
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.

What is a "junk" request? Is it hammering an expensive endpoint 5000 times per second, or just somebody using your website in a way you don't like? I've also been on both sides of it (on-call at 3am getting dos'd is no fun), but I think the danger here is that we've gotten to a point where a new google can't realistically be created. The thing is that these tools are generally used to further entrench power that mono…

Actually, I think creating google alternative has never been as doable as it is today.

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

#168

Post by jillyboel »

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.

accept reality and design your api so it's not a problem

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

#169

Post by idlephysicist »

zlagen wrote: post #5

I'm using chrome on linux and noticed that this year cloudflare is very agressive in showing the "Verify you are a human" box. Now a lot of sites that use cloudflare show it and once you solve the challenge it shows it again after 30 minutes! What are you protecting cloudflare? Also they show those captchas when going to robots.txt... unbelievable.

> What are you protecting cloudflare?

A cheeky response is "their profit margins", but I don't think that quite right considering that their earnings per share is $-0.28.

I've not looked into Cloudflare much, I've never needed their services, so I'm not totally sure on what all their revenue streams are. I have heard that small websites are not paying much if anything at all [1]. With that preface out of the way–I think that we see challenges on sites that perhaps don't need them as a form of advertising, to ensure that their name is ever-present. Maybe they don't need this form of advertising, or maybe they do.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/plans/

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