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Comment by taurknaut

1 year ago

> using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits.

Well i've certainly never heard of this browser before and it still seems pretty young. I'd guess it's the same issue.

Arc is almost 3 (4?) years old and was the darling child of dev influencers for the better part of 2 years. It's not a niche browser, especially amongst devs that are likely to work at Cloudflare.

  • It's definitely a niche browser. I think I heard of it once on HN over the past few years, and I'd be surprised if there was actually more than a few thousands of people using it.

    • I would be surprised if it were that low; the arcbrowser sub Reddit has 50 thousand members. Still, regardless of the actual figure, I think there's a broader point which avoids the need to agree on an absolute threshold: should cloudflare block access to websites using a blacklist or should it grant access using a whitelist? Especially since it's trivial to spoof your user agent.

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I'm still not sure how some random browser should result in a block by the provider. I don't think there's any security risk for the provider of the site by using an outdated browser. Blocking malicious IPs yes/maybe, blocking suspicious acitivity maybe. But because you have browser X - please not.

This is going to lead two a two-class internet where new technologies will not emerge and big players will win because the gate the high is so absurdly high and random that people stop to invent.

  • I presume this was not intentional.

    • One cannot assume a problem is minor, rare, unimportant, or easy to fix purely on the basis of it being unintentional.

      Consider automobile accidents.