bug#59546: qutebrowser and icecat stuck in infinite browser checks (cloudflare) on applicable sites

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hello,

"bdju" <bdju@tilde.team> writes:

> I have hit this issue before, but not in a while. I don't know for sure
> when the issue came back as it only matters for the initial login or
> visit of the offending sites, so if you manage to get past you'll be
> good until your cookie expires or gets deleted somehow. I got logged out
> of many sites in qutebrowser recently and was made aware of the issue
> being back. I also tested in icecat where some sites I still had a
> cookie, but I managed to find one with a browser check and it indeed
> never completes (can leave it open hours or even more than a day).

> Some sites to test with include:
> https://www.livechart.me/ (must click login button, main page works)
> https://www.gitlab.com/ (again must click log in to start the check)
>
> Since this is happening in both icecat and qutebrowser with different
> user agents and everything, I suspect a guix-related issue. I found that
> at least one other person on IRC was also experiencing the infinite
> browser checks. I use a few sites daily that are now unusable on my Guix
> System machine due to these browser checks, so a fix would be very much
> appreciated if anyone could figure this out.

I've had that too with Gitlab when using Icecat.  Sadly, it has nothing
to do with Guix but with how Cloudfare and the website identifies
browsers.

For example, I had found out that by using a Windows Firefox 83 user
agent, I was able to login into Gitlab (using this plugin:
https://gitlab.com/ntninja/user-agent-switcher).  I reported the issue
to Gitlab, and they could apparently fixed it on their side (not yet
deployed) [0]

[0]  https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/345328

I think other sites or CloudFare must be similarly faulty, or require
fingerprinting which is guarded against out-of-the-box in IceCat.

Closing, as I doubt Guix has something to do with it.  If you find
something to the contrary, let us know!

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim