Fix Pale Moon browser not passing Cloudflare’s “Check your browser” verification
The Pale Moon web browser runs in an endless “check your browser” loop on sites that use Cloudflare’s browser integrity check feature.
I confirmed the problem in the latest release versions of the Pale Moon browser. Some sites display the “check your browser before accessing” page over and over again. There doesn’t seem to be a way around this at the time of this writing, and the topic is discussed in multiple places, including the official one. Pale Moon Forum but also the Cloudflare Support Forum.
The message displayed on the infinitely reloading page may differ, depending on how the site has implemented the functionality. SteamDB, a popular database site for the Steam gaming platform, displays the current message during browser integrity checks.
It is not clear why the infinite loop occurs, as Cloudflare has not released an official statement. One user suggested that it might have something to do with the user agent that is revealed to sites when pages load. Pale Moon includes a reference to Firefox 68.0 in the user agent for compatibility reasons. Firefox 68.0 is an old version of Firefox, which was released in June 2019.
The main developer of the Pale Moon browser posted a comment on the Cloudflare community website, stating that the browser was also identified as Pale Moon all along. In fact, the latest version of Pale Moon is identified as such in the user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/5.0 Firefox/68.0 PaleMoon/30.0.1
Cloudflare’s parser may object to the Firefox part, as that version is old and is no longer maintained by Mozilla.
It seems from the discussion on the official site that this issue may not be fixed. If that is the case, it would significantly affect the compatibility of Pale Moon on the Internet. Pale Moon users could try to spoof the user agent to see if this allows them to pass verification.
This is how you do it:
- Install the State User Agent extension for Pale Moon and restart the browser.
- Click the extension icon in the status bar and replace the Useragent string with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:100.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/100.0.
- Note that you may need to adjust the string to follow the latest versions of Firefox.
- Activate the “Set AU” button.
The browser should pass Cloudflare’s integrity check and the actual site should load fine.
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