Six weeks in CloudFlare stalling; still blocking niche browsers.

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: https://forum.palemoon.org/vie...
2024-07-08: https://forum.palemoon.org/vie...
2025-01-30: https://forum.palemoon.org/vie...

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:
https://forum.palemoon.org/vie...

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.

Current list of affected browsers.

[BenFenner]

Pale Moon
Basilisk
Waterfox
Falkon
SeaMonkey
Various Firefox ESR flavors
Thorium (on some systems)
Ungoogled Chromium


Source: https://forum.palemoon.org/vie... [palemoon.org]

Anti-bot measures.

[Z00L00K]

I see that this is some kind of anti-bot measure that fails.

I suspect that the reason for them wanting a NDA to be signed is to prevent ways to circumvent the anti-bot measures. However many bots are able to be quite adaptive today and work around those measures anyway so it's a futile solution from that perspective and only hurts actual human users.

And the bots in question are spambots posting ads for various questionable items.

They want Chromium to rule over all.

[Mal-2]

It would make their lives as developers so much easier if they could just target one rendering engine across every platform. Firefox's new TOS is unacceptable to you? I guess you either don't update (which is what I've chosen thus far, waiting on a new TOS that incorporates all of their external promises) or you go with something Chromium-based and play straight into the monopoly.