Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ocha | Hacker News Reader

FYI. Title is misleading. This experience has nothing to do Firefox vs Chrome. Result is because of 3rd party cookie and tracker blocking. I had same and even worse (I was not able to get through captcha) experience on chrome itself because I have 3rd party cookies disabled and couple privacy oriented extensions running.

View on HN

No, I believe it is because the Chrome as a browser works in conjunction with Gmail and other google properties' logins to kinda figure out that you're a human.

One of the things, if it ever gets there, would be for the anti-trust probe, if any, to look at how Google shares data between its browser, Chrome, and it's other services.

How would the website code communicate with the browser, unless it was some open API you can refer to. As for "in conjunction with Gmail", yes that's called cookies.

Goole websites (and frames in other websites) share information with Chrome browser. That's what the Chrome Login brouhaha was all about.

From my understanding, that's just expanded cookies. The Chrome frame can see the cookie from your Gmail, and also log you in the browser, and vice versa. Nothing magical going on, just cookies.

This! I have a Chrome development profile which I primarily use for testing. When I encounter a captcha it's the same painful experience as the OP's FF video. I don't have restrictions around cookies or tracking either. My best guess is that I just don't have as much "usage history" on that profile for Google to just declare me clearly human. Alternatively, on my main profile that I use for normal browsing captcha (which it still sucks) is never as painful.

But I never touch cookies in FF and never install any privacy features. I have been facing the same for years.

This cannot be entirely correct as I use Chrome and Firefox with as close as possible configuration, with uBlock Origin with exact same settings, and the behaviour I've encountered is very similar to the one shown here. I'm logged in to my google account in both browsers as well.

Probably you are right. I use tracker and 3rd party cookies blocking in FF and I often spend 30-60 seconds solving captchas. Often Google says that I solved it wrong (although I try to be careful) so I have to solve it 3-4 times, sometimes with those slowly appearing images. Upgraded my skills of recognising bridges, buses and fire hydrants but still struggle with searching storefronts.

Your comment is correct, Firefox now blocks trackers and it's probably, and hopefully, blocking whatever recaptcha uses to determine you're not a robot. So using firefox you get the harder recaptcha because it's blocking Google from spying on you.

reCAPTCHA needs to be re-engineered to work even in the face of privacy measures in browsers. Otherwise it will be better at distinguishing expert humans from ordinary humans than at distinguishing bots from humans.

I'm sure there's room for improvement but at some point this is paradoxical. Users who want data privacy want their presence and behavior obfuscated, which is fundamentally opposed to anti-fraud systems which are designed to analyze the presence and behavior of users to determine if they are fraudulent.

The way recaptcha happens to work now, and its purported goal - to differentiate humans from bots - are two different things. Privacy is not fundamentally opposed to anti-fraud in the slightest.

I said that privacy is fundamentally opposed to anti-fraud systems, not the general concept of anti-fraud. To an automated anti-fraud system, there is no difference between a user who obfuscates their identity because they want privacy and a bot who obfuscates its identity because it doesn't want to be revealed as a bot.

The user is complaining about the slow CSS animations. It's definitely a bug though not something they did on purpose. I remember having the same issue on Chrome as well.

IIRC, it is something they do on purpose, to make it clear to the user something is happening while rate-limiting challenges given to the user.

Oh no Google ReCaptcha doesn't work that way. In case of rate limiting, they will just throw an error. It's probably some clever JS or CSS that got a bug in it. Here's the official thread on GH: https://github.com/google/recaptcha/issues/268

Disclaimer: We built a solution at SerpApi.com to solve those offline using ML. Timing of solving doesn't matter. It will be odd that they do that just to annoy user when it's not a technical limitation.

They’re slow because it’s live-challenging two or more recaptcha users at once with an unknown image, right?

It's not a bug. Its part of a patent Google holds designed at frustrating access for bots.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com