HN user
After almost ten days of deafening silence and broken Internet access, I guess we have to paraphrase Adam Martinetti, the Cloudflare Product Manager from 2022 and conclude that in 2025:
Cloudflare DOES want to be in the business of saying one browser is more legitimate than another.
Unfortunately not. Cloudflare verification goes deeper into browser 'mechanics' than that. Not to mention it could flag you as malicious if you dare attempt bypassing it.
Fair enough, but... if Cloudflare's challenge bugs out who is going to fix it? Aren't they responsible for their own critical tools?
Because in the end, the result is connection denial. I don't want to connect to Cloudflare, I want to connect to the website.
I read that part. They still do not indicate what may happen, or what is their responsibility -if any- for visitors with non-major browsers.
Not claiming this is "on purpose" or a conspiracy, but if these legitimate protests keep getting ignored then yes, it becomes discrimination. If they can't be bothered, they should clearly state that their tool is only compatible with X browsers. Who is to blame for "an incorrectly received challenge"? The website? The user who chooses a secure, but "wrong" browser not on their whitelist?
Cloudflare is there for security, not "major browser approval pass". They have the resources to increase response times, provide better support and deal with these incompatibility issues. But do they want to? Until now, they did.
This crash is an even newer Cloudflare issue (as of yesterday, I believe). It is not related to the one discussed here, and will be solved in the next browser update:
Not exactly. They say:
"Challenges are not supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer."
Nowhere is it mentioned that internet access will be denied to visitors not using "major" browsers, as defined by Cloudflare presumably. That wouldn't sound too legal, honestly.
Below that: "Visitors must enable JavaScript and cookies on their browser to be able to pass any type of challenge."
These conditions are met.
Forgot to clarify: this is not about an increased amount of captchas, or an annoyance issue.
The Cloudflare tool does not complete its verifications, resulting in an endless "Verifying..." loop and thus none of the websites in question can be accessed. All you get to see is Cloudflare.