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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

#461

Post by lotsofpulp »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #445
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures. The problem is that all these Cloudflare forensics-based throttling and blocking efforts don't hurt sales figures. The number of legitimate users running Arc is a rounding error. Arc browser users often come to Cloudflare without third-party tracking and without cookies, which is weird and therefore suspicious…

The number of legitimate users on "not chrome, edge, safari, or firefox" is about 10% of the browser market. I don't know about you, but if I'm running a shop, and the whole point of my website is to make sales, but my front door is preventing 10% of those sales? That door is getting replaced.

You don't think the people actually running the shops, whose income depends on the shop, have thought of that and thus there exists a downside that more than offsets the upside?

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

#462

Post by chaoskitty »

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…

So you're saying that which browsers are supported on the Internet should be determined by a single, for-profit company? That's a very interesting and shorthsighted take.

I love how so many of these apologists talk about stuff like "maintenance costs", as though it's impossible to write code that's clean and works consistently across platforms / browsers. "Oh, no! Who'll think of the profits?!?"

If you had any technical knowledge, you'd know that "maintenance costs" are only a thing when you code shittily or intentionally target specific cases. A well written, cross-browser, cross-platform CAPTCHA shouldn't have so many browser specific edge cases that it needs constant "maintenance".

In other words, imagine you're arguing that a web page with a picture doesn't load on a browser because nobody bothered to test with that browser. Now imagine you're making the case for that browser being so obscure that nobody would expend the time and money. Instead, why aren't you pondering why any web site with a picture wouldn't be general enough to just work? What does that say about your agenda, and about the fact that you want to make excuses for this huge, striving-to-be-a-monopoly, for-profit company?

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

#463

Post by chaoskitty »

jmbwell wrote: post #32

I'm still in the habit of granting Cloudflare a presumption of good faith. Developers frequently make assumptions about things like browsers that can cause problems like this. Something somewhere gets over-optimized, or someone somewhere does some 80/20 calculation, or something gets copy-pasted or (these days) produced by an LLM. There are plenty of reasons why this might be entirely unintentional, or that the sever…

How many times do they have to do the same thing before we modify our presumtion?

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

#464

Post by carlosjobim »

BytesAndGears wrote: post #430
carlosjobim wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fraud protection does iDeal have for customers?

I’m not actually sure since I never had issues, but I’ve heard it’s not much since they’re basically just an API for transferring money between banks. Each bank app still needs to integrate with the network separately. [1] I guess you get some security since each party that you transfer to must have their identity verified with a bank, so you could always get the police involved fairly easily The iDeal website page o…

Thank you for the explanation. Then I think credit/Debit cards are a better option for the customer, considering they have fraud protection.

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

#465

Post by chaoskitty »

areyourllySorry wrote: post #339
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Cloudflare does that can't possibly be implemented locally by a site owner?

handle terabytes per second of bot traffic

...which happens to the average site owner how often...?

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

#466

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

Analemma_ wrote: post #436
gosub100 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can find you literally hundreds of posts from people insisting that ADA is nothing but a small-business-killing shakedown, that it's makework for lawyers, that it's doing nothing to help the disabled, and that it's just as bad if not worse than DEI. What makes your claim better than theirs?

> What makes your claim better than theirs?

Well, for starters it's not so absolute:

> it's doing nothing to help the disabled

It's obviously doing something for the disabled. Reserved disabled parking spots and wheelchair-accessible building entrances are requirements of the ADA. It seems reasonable to think it "improves people's lives". A whole bunch of contrary opinions are not necessarily reasons for disagreement as much as they are simply disagreement.

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

#467

Post by chaoskitty »

zinekeller wrote: post #164
nerdralph wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's absolutely no data to back up the suggestion that sites regularly suffer from DDoS.

It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.

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

#469

Post by chaoskitty »

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: Don't look at the logs.

Bots are a fact of life. Secure your site properly, follow good practices, set up notifications for important things, log stuff, but don't look at the logs unless you have a reason to look at the logs.

Having run web servers forever, this is simply normal. What's not normal is blindly trusting a megacorporation to make my logs quiet. What're they doing? Who are they blocking? What guidelines do they use? Nobody, except them, knows.

It's why I self-host email. Sure, you might feel safe because most people use Gmail or Outlook, and therefore if there are problems, you can point the finger at them, but what if you want to discuss spam? Or have technical discussions about Trojans and viruses? Or you need to be 100% absolutely certain that email related to specific events is delivered, with no exceptions? You can't do that with Gmail / Outlook, because they have filters that you can't see and you can't control.

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

#470

Post by hexagonwin »

gloosx wrote: post #277
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…

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)

This is iOS 6 and not iPhone 6, btw.
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