Comment by johnklos
1 year ago
Will Cloudflare people try to get us to believe that they "didn't know" or say that it only affects a tiny number of people, or somehow try to gaslight us in to thinking that non-mainstream browsers are a threat to something or another?
For a company that has so many of their employees on this site, they sure do seem to be clueless when their supposedly amazing tech marginalizes people or otherwise creates issues. Even when they respond in these threads, it takes ages for them to address things, and often the problems are never permanently fixed and come up again after some time.
It reminds me of this fortune(6):
As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.
-- Weisert
Perhaps fans of Cloudflare will downvote instead of engage, but that's almost a given these days. Let's be real - Cloudflare has been given a free pass for far too long. If you disagree and REALLY believe that there're technically valid reasons for punishing people who use non-mainstream browsers, try to actually engage and discuss. I'm truly interested in someone's take about why we're doing something wrong by not using what everyone else is using.
There's a fundamental tension here between scale and openness. Cloudflare's bot detection likely relies on statistical models[1] trained on mainstream browser behavior. When you operate at their scale, even a 0.1% false positive rate affects millions (billions?) of users, but the economic incentives push toward minimizing false negatives (actual bots getting through to prevent leaking) rather than false positives (real users getting blocked).
The real issue isn't just Cloudflare - it's the centralization of web infrastructure that creates these single points of failure for browser diversity. Alternative browsers aren't just about personal preference - they're essential for innovation and preventing technological monoculture. We should be demanding transparent criteria for what constitutes "suspicious" behavior rather than accepting black-box filtering.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/plans/biz-and-ent/#he...