Comment by Sohcahtoa82
3 years ago
> Using a "non-mainstream browser" is not in fact an indicator of malicious or even "annoying" behavior. It's almost certainly not even statistically associated. In fact, if you're going to build a bot that impersonates a browser, the natural choice right now is to impersonate Chrome
This is a good point.
Bots are going to try to make their traffic look as legit as possible, which means spoofing the most common browsers with the most common setups.
So if a User-Agent is reporting that it's running Firefox, it's actually more likely that it's legit traffic, as bots wouldn't try to pretend to be an uncommon setup.
It isn't a good point though. The problem isn't that a user might be malicious because they are or are not running Chrome, the problem is that you chose Firefox and that comes with compromises, just like picking Chrome comes with compromises.
The "non-mainstream browser" comment is about zigging when the overwhelming majority of people zag. It's a self-inflicted problem.
Don't like it? Pick a different set of compromises, whether that's using Privacy Pass or a Chromium-derivative browser. God forbid people work on the problem itself rather than just complain that they don't like compromising.
You can't demand "taking away knobs" with taking away control of the end user on CloudFlare whilst simultaneously lamenting that using Firefox (browser choice is a "knob") yields compromises. It's hypocritical.
Why shouldn't people be free to deny Tor users access to their server? Why shouldn't people be free to self-inflict their set of compromises on themselves with their choice of browser? Why shouldn't people be free to mitigate bruteforce attacks? It may not align with your views or beliefs, but that service provider is free to do as they please within the extent of the law. Doesn't make it ethical, but your access to the service depends on x.
Life is compromise.