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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

I have reproduced this on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with stock Falkon browser (QT+Webkit) and javascript enabled. I have confirmed that this is accomplished through UA sniffing. I reproduce the message in plaintext below:

Sign in with a supported browser To help protect your account, Google doesn’t let you sign in from some browsers. Google might stop sign-ins from browsers that:

Don’t support JavaScript or have Javascript turned off. Have unsecure or unsupported extensions added. Use automation testing frameworks. Are embedded in a different application.

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Opera went through this fight between e.g. 2004-2013.

It wasn't really fully resolved until the browser engine was switched to Blink/Chromium.

Now, of course Opera is ~indirectly managed by the chinese government, so no-one should be using it. Please just trust me on this one. The desktop browser is now built in Poland (not Norway/Sweden). The remaining technical management is very weak when it comes to things like principles.

Son of a bitch. I love Opera. I use it for home and work.

Vivaldi is the spiritual successor

Do you have a source on China (indirectly) managing Opera?

A source on China indirectly managing Chinese companies?

That is generally speaking a true statement, regardless of which Chinese company you're speaking of. Do you want a source on that?

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

"Opera is a freeware web browser ..., developed by Opera Software, a Norwegian software company, ... with the majority of ownership and control belonging to Chinese businessman Zhou Yahui, founder of Beijing Kunlun Tech and Chinese cybersecurity company Qihoo 360."

Just tried Links, doesn't work. They let you try, presumably because they like fucking with people, but then block you when you successfully log in.

Time to get off my ass and switch email providers, finally.

[EDIT] incidentally, is this what we can expect to see on more and more sites as Google's new version of Recaptcha rolls out?

Which provider do you intend to switch to? It's something I've been meaning to do for a while but haven't had the time to research alternatives.

Probably just fastmail. I have trouble justifying the higher expense of maybe-more-secure options like Protonmail when really 99% of my use of email is transactional stuff or (product, job) alerts or updates. I've trialed them a couple times for side projects that never went anywhere, and they seem nice enough.

I think you'll like Fastmail. I moved from Gmail in January, and was surprised that the spam protection is even better than Gmail's.

I still have a few Gmail accounts for clients, and my Fastmail accounts get about half the spam.

Get off your ass indeed. It took me the better part of 3 months to close my Google account and get rid of Gmail.

Was JavaScript enabled and allowed to run automatically in your browser on *.google.com when you reproduced this?

Yes, changing the user agent was all I needed to do in order to be permitted to log in. Not that javascript is required for GMail - it has a perfectly serviceable 'basic HTML' mode. Google's own support document[0] provides a link to it, although notably it's not canonical (the link will be different you than for me (why??)).

The same document is now obsolete - it claims "If you're using a browser that isn't supported, you'll see Gmail in HTML view." This is not true, as in fact what you'll see is "up yours, go away".

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en

>unsupported extensions added

I find it a security threat that websites are able to tell what extensions I have installed, supported or otherwise.

Only a problem with Chrome.

I sort of interpret "unsupported extensions" as "adblockers" - and with the current model of modifying the DOM I don't think it's preventable.

Maybe in the future we could run the website in one version of the DOM, hidden from the user, and then have the adblocker make a separate DOM that is displayed to the user. That loses almost all of the anti tracking and most of the security benefits though.

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