How about Cloudflare stops penalizing non-chrome browsers with elevated rates of bot checks and captchas?

They don’t penalize browsers for not being Chrome – Safari users almost never see those, because their devices support a protocol for attesting real hardware with a real user, in what is hopefully a privacy-preserving manner:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...

That’s the underlying problem here: web sites are constantly getting suspicious traffic and if you do something like using Tor or a “free” VPN, the owners of those sites are probably going to ask companies like Cloudflare to validate or block you rather than try to tell whether you’re a bot.

Anyone concerned with privacy really needs to be focused on that problem because most site owners care more about not going broke than supporting browsers or privacy tools which few of their customers use. It’s destroying the open web.

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nerpderp82 4 days ago | parent [-]

So you are saying they don't penalize browser from not being Chrome and then link to a specific mechanism that they are allow listing Safari. That goes directly counter to what you are claiming.

I have seen it myself, from my own system. Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in. Multiple times.

Suspicious traffic is using Firefox, because Chrome browsers are 90%+ of the traffic. And the rich mac users have a special mechanism for bypassing them as your article outlines.

Using Firefox is the internet equivalent of DWB.

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acdha 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in.

This is very much not my experience. I don't know if you use a VPN or have a ton of extensions but if I was hitting that so hard I'd consider trying a clean profile with no extensions and adding things back in to see if you can find the trigger condition.

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lkbm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Firefox on macOS is fine. I've been using it as my primary browser for years. I consistently get captchas on archive.is (and just verified I also do on Brave), but rarely see it elsewhere.

I don't know the cause of what you're seeing, but it's not simply Firefox.

	▲	doublerabbit 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I get them with Firefox on FreeBSD. Chromium on FreeBSD less so.

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esperent 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Firefox on Ubuntu here. I switched over the past couple of months from using Chrome on Windows.

I see exactly the same amount of security checks, as far as I can tell.