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Six Weeks of CloudFlare Stalling; Still Blocking Niche Browsers

posted by janrinok on Monday March 17, @06:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the WWW-or-not dept.

BenFenner writes:

For the third time in recent memory, CloudFlare has blocked large swaths of niche browsers and their users from accessing web sites that CloudFlare gate-keeps. In the past these issues have been resolved quickly (within a week) and apologies issued with promises to do better:
2024-03-11: Cloudflare checks broken again?
2024-07-08: Cloudflare checks broken yet AGAIN?
2025-01-30: Cloudflare Verification Loop issues

This time around it has been over 6 weeks and CloudFlare has been unable or unwilling to fix the problem on their end, effectively stalling any progress on the matter with various tactics including asking browser developers to sign overarching NDAs:
Re: CloudFlare: summary and status

Some of the affected browsers:
• Pale Moon
• Basilisk
• Waterfox
• Falkon
• SeaMonkey
• Various Firefox ESR flavors
• Thorium (on some systems)
• Ungoogled Chromium

From the main developer of Pale Moon:

Our current situation remains unchanged: CloudFlare is still blocking our access to websites through the challenges, and the captcha/turnstile continues to hang the browser until our watchdog terminates the hung script after which it reloads and hangs again after a short pause (but allowing users to close the tab in that pause, at least). To say that this upsets me is an understatement. Other than deliberate intent or absolute incompetence, I see no reason for this to endure. Neither of those options are very flattering for CloudFlare.

I wish I had better news.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday March 18, @09:04AM (1 child)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Tuesday March 18, @09:04AM (#1396928)

    The fault is with the web developers who use cloudflare. Had they not all decided on putting their websites behind "gatekeepers" we would not have this issue.

    Truth be told for me Cloudflare and others have long since not worked (probably because I make heavy use of niche browsers like pale moon), and I figure any website owner who puts their website behind a gatekeeper obviously wants to remove traffic from their site, so I honour their request and go find a non-gatekeeper alternative instead.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by Undefined on Tuesday March 18, @02:48PM

    by Undefined (50365) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 18, @02:48PM (#1396971)

    I figure any website owner who puts their website behind a gatekeeper obviously wants to remove traffic from their site, so I honour their request and go find a non-gatekeeper alternative instead.

    This is the way.

    Websites should just work. IMO, as soon as you start coding for "if it's this browser, do this, otherwise, do that" you're contributing to Internet-rot.

    Yeah, that definitely narrows what you can do, but the vast majority of the time, it removes what you shouldn't do.

    I make sure specialty coding stays off my lawn.