Users of Waterfox Classic and Pale Moon browsers have been reporting that they're stuck in an infinite loop of Cloudflare's infamous "checking your browser" screen and can't access web sites that enabled Cloudflare's browser integrity check feature.
Ghacks' post [1] has a good summary of related links and an active discussion at comments section, though the "protection" got more strict in the meantime thus the mentioned workaround isn't effective anymore.
Some users have posted at Clodflare community forum to no avail and Cloudflare support is only available to paid customers. Visitors are told to contact respective web site owners and forum threads are locked quickly.
Let me be clear, this is not a case of a web site owner deciding to use a recent feature that's not supported by these browsers. That'd between visitors and owners of that web site, and completely understandable.
This is a serious issue. A 3rd party corporation is deliberately deciding which browsers are legitimate and which are not. They prevent users of these browsers from accessing millions of websites with a flip of a switch. There's no transparency and no accountability to their actions.
I hope this issue will be heard, fixed and never be repeated again.
We've seen the push for HTTPS in recent years accelerate and become more and more aggressive (in a good way).
Browsers have arguably led this drive by notifying users that the pages they are viewing are "NOT SECURE", through the use of pad-lock icons in the URL bar or even notifications under textboxes (e.g. Firefox) [0]. Chrome, too, is driving this trend. And with users fearful of sending data over a "non secure connection", they'll be vocal enough to push website owners to fix this issue.
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So, if you could decide: what feature or measure would you want to see adopted as quickly as the push to make all sites use HTTPS?
[EDIT: kudos if you describe how your new standard could be "forced", e.g. through a URL-bar icon, notifying users somehow, etc. How would you convince other developers and maintainers of large code-bases, websites, browser vendors, etc. that they should throw their support behind your initiative?]
Think ambitiously too -- imagine your proposed feature would have the same backing and urgency as we have with HTTPS, with browsers (for better or for worse) authoritatively "dictating" the new way of doing things.
I just received an e-mail from Google yesterday that they are discontinuing G Suite Legacy Free edition (which I believe was called 'Google Apps For Your Domain' back in the day). Public info is at https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-legacy-free-edition-leaving-users-worried/
They intend to have a free tier, but without the most important feature, e-mail at your existing e-mail address. I've set up my kids with e-mail addresses from this domain, and have a couple accounts myself, for ten accounts in all. The cheapest paid option is going to be $6 (USD, presumably) / month / account, or $720/year for the 10 accounts, which is a non-starter, as I'm not using this for a business.
If possible, I'd like to keep the e-mail accounts working. I am able to administer my DNS settings, so changing the, uh, MX records shouldn't be too hard.
What options should I look at? I gather that running your own e-mail server is horrible unless you want to spend your life running the server. Are there inexpensive services that will host e-mail with custom domains?
Opera, once known for revolutionizing web browsing and pushing boundaries had to suffer in the last few years quite much.
First their origin engine was abandoned in favor of Chromium to be able to be competitive again which many users have not liked as many features have been taken away, then the possible news of a sale and now this.
What will the future bring for Opera? Nobody knows, there is only once constant: Many people feel not in favor that Chinese investors take control over the company and will leave Opera.
One of my computers has been offline for years. The current chrome vesion on it is 60 or so, which was released in 2018, but the copyright nofication on the "about" window says 2021 instead of 2018? How is this possible if it is offline and never updated?
It's been known since around ~2010 that browsing the web with javascript enabled allows third parties to track you across the internet irrespective of whether you have DNT/cookies enabled or use incognito mode. It seems that now similar approaches can be used to track you even if you use different browsers [1] and the source is available if not fully complete [2].
Quite a good talk on this last year at MS Research[3].
This raises a question - will we see users start to disable javascript in the same way as they have started to enable DNT and (to a degree disable cookies)?
Ghacks' post [1] has a good summary of related links and an active discussion at comments section, though the "protection" got more strict in the meantime thus the mentioned workaround isn't effective anymore.
Some users have posted at Clodflare community forum to no avail and Cloudflare support is only available to paid customers. Visitors are told to contact respective web site owners and forum threads are locked quickly.
Let me be clear, this is not a case of a web site owner deciding to use a recent feature that's not supported by these browsers. That'd between visitors and owners of that web site, and completely understandable.
This is a serious issue. A 3rd party corporation is deliberately deciding which browsers are legitimate and which are not. They prevent users of these browsers from accessing millions of websites with a flip of a switch. There's no transparency and no accountability to their actions.
I hope this issue will be heard, fixed and never be repeated again.
[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/05/fix-pale-moon-browser-not-passing-cloudflares-checking-your-browser-verification/
Other links:
https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox-Classic/issues/107