Comment by jml7c5 19 hours ago
>I have a hard time understanding robot detection as an issue of "user freedom" or "browser competition".
The big one is that running a browser other than Chrome (or Safari) could come to mean endless captchas, degrading the experience. "Chrome doesn't have as many captchas" is a pretty good hook.
> So the market isn't allowed to detect robots (...)
I don't know what you mean by "the market".
What I do know is that if I try to go to a site with my favourite browser and a site blocks me because it's so poorly engineered it thinks I am a bot just because I'm not using Chrome, then it's pretty obvious that it's not detecting bots.
Also worth noting: it might surprise you that there browser automation frameworks. Some of them, such as Selenium, support Chrome.
I’m not sure who “the market” is in this case, but reCAPTCHA is owned and implemented by Google and clearly favors their browser. Any attempts to use other browsers or obfuscate your digital footprint in the slightest leads to all kinds of headaches. It’s a very convenient side effect of their “anti-bot” efforts that they have every incentive to steer in to.
This isn't Google's doing but Mozilla's. Firefox's strict tracking protection blocks third-party cookies. The site you're trying to visit isn't hosting reCAPTCHA itself; reCAPTCHA was loaded from a third-party origin (Google); so the cookie that Google sets saying you passed the CAPTCHA is blocked by Firefox.
You can add an exception in Firefox's settings to allow third-party cookies for CAPTCHAs. Google's reCAPTCHA cookie is set by "recaptcha.net", and CloudFlare's CAPTCHA has exactly the same problem, whose domain is "challenges.cloudflare.com".
If the cookies aren't set and passed back, then they can't know that you've solved it, so you get another one.
I use Safari (admittedly, with Private Cloud and a few tracking-blocking extensions) and get bombarded with Cloudflare's 'prove you are human' checkbox several times an hour.
It's already a pretty degraded experience.
I mean you're using a VPN, they can't tell the diff between you and a bunch of bots
Concretely: Google meet blocks all sorts of browsers / private tabs with a vague: “you cannot join this meeting” error. They let mainstream ones in though.