bug#45179: qutebrowser stuck at Cloudflare 'browser checks'

[Ben Sturmfels]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2020, Michael Rohleder wrote:

> Hello bdju,
>
> "bdju" <bdju@tilde.team> writes:
>> guix (GNU Guix) 91e35e32a4938e0e37499c64fa8ed3e7cf51dce3
>> some example sites with browser checks:
>> https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in
>> http://livechart.me/
>
> A workaround is setting the "User Agent" string to something CF likes, e.g. 
> like this:
> qutebrowser --temp-basedir --set content.headers.user_agent 'Mozilla/5.0
> (Windows NT 6.1; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0'
> https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in
>
> Maybe the reason why the (very helpful) #qutebrowser folks can't
> reproduce this, is because they use another qt version (qutebrowser uses
> qtwebengine) and perhaps this sets user agent to a string that CF has
> whitelisted.
>
> I don't think there is much we could do here (besides updating qt and
> mbakke has that in the pipeline, afaik).

I'm also having similar issues accessing gitlab.com with IceCat.
Installing the User Agent Switcher and setting to "Linux / Firefox 82"
fixed this for me.

For context I also tried starting IceCat up in safe mode and switching
tracking protection back to "standard", but no good. The issue appears
to be that Cloudflare are essentially blocking niche user agents.

Regards,
Ben