Comment by ajross
So the market isn't allowed to detect robots because some sites have bad captcha implementations? I'm not following. Captchas aren't implement by the browser.
So the market isn't allowed to detect robots because some sites have bad captcha implementations? I'm not following. Captchas aren't implement by the browser.
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.
You're blaming Mozilla because they fixed a security vulnerability, and then saying that the workaround is to reenable the vulnerability so that Google can continue surveilling.
Yet for some inexplicable reason all the other bot detection methods I encounter online don’t struggle at all with me and don’t stick me in infinite loops. Cloudflare for instance simply does not bug out with rare exceptions for me.
Maybe my experience is atypical but it seems to me this is a reCAPTCHA problem, not a Mozilla one. It’s Google’s problem. I imagine they can solve this but simply don’t want to.
Maybe I’m wrong but again, i encounter more issues with their “anti bot” methods than any other by a massive margin.
> 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.