15 ms·
GoDaddy locks out derivatives of Chrome
Only allows direct versions of Google Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox
See message here when using Brave, a Google Chrome (chromium) derivative: https://i.imgur.com/MV66H85.png https://i.imgur.com/MV66H85.png
Triggered when trying to log in.
- GnarfGnarf 4y agoI've been using GoDaddy as one of my registrars for 25+ years. Their tech. support is excellent. However, their recent switch to MS Office 365 / Outlook for email has been a fiasco, and pushed me one step closer to dropping them.
- pinebox 4y agoThat switch from their own webmail solution to Microsoft a year or two ago was the final straw for me and the single domain I still had with GoDaddy. If I had wanted to use MS email I would have been using it already. Transferred to Gandi.net and while the webmail isn't as featureful (Roundcube) at least it's cheaper.
- mp3geek 4y agoHey @mrspence, Enabled shields. Test the following, add into brave://adblock (custom filters): godaddy.com##+js(set, navigator.userAgent, '') godaddy.com##+js(set, navigator.connection, {}) (logout and re-login into godaddy)
- ColinWright 4y agoI'm reminded of this: https://www.technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-best-viewed-with-internet-explorer/ https://www.technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-retur... Also submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094029
- SamSkjord 4y agoWorks fine with Waterfox (with uBlock)
- andybak 4y ago"Your browser is a bit unusual". Why, yes. Thank you for noticing. That is entirely intentional. Welcome to the web.
- abirch 4y agoToo bad there's not a chance to respond, "I assume all responsibility for my unusual browser." I remember having to change the user agent string in Konqueror
- sshine 4y agoYou would do that rather than change domain provider?
- capableweb 4y agoFaking the User-Agent usually involves changing one configuration value in your browser. Changing your domain provider usually involves finding a new provider, evaluating it, setting up payments, moving a bunch of records and so on. I know what I'd do unless I was already planning on changing my domain management.
- oarsinsync 4y agoAgreed that changing a UA is definitely the easier short term solution. The downside is that in the long run, you’re signalling to a consumer-hostile business that you’re happy for them to continue to be hostile towards you. When dealing with duopolies, pragmatic solutions are all there are. When dealing with highly competitive marketplaces, ‘pragmatism’ and ‘laziness’ can often overlap in both positive and negative ways. A positive pragmatic lazy solution I found to consolidate all the different registrars I used was to use Hover’s transfer-in concierge service. Of course, this now means giving money to Tucows instead, but they offend me less than GD.
- rsstack 4y agoI too would prefer to press a button once rather than change a domain provider, yes.
- 4cao 4y agoSeems to still work with Ungoogled Chromium. Edit: Or do you need to try to log in to get this message? (That's what the screenshot suggests.)
- okasaki 4y agoI've been getting that message for over a year. I don't think it's browser related. I tried pretty much every browser. I can't log in at home, but it works fine at work. Whatever it is, I'm never using godaddy again.
- prmoustache 4y agoadblocker / js blocker and privacy extensions can trigger that. I get similar error for different websites or gets additionnal captcha to answer because I use ghostery.
- okasaki 4y agoYes, but in this case I tried chromium with a brand new profile, and even installed Windows in a VM to use internet explorer. Nothing worked. I called godaddy support and was ultimately told to use a different ISP.
- smitty1e 4y agoWhen everyone becomes adept at changing their user agent to beat these filters, what so these whiz kids do?
- prmoustache 4y agoI don't think it is user agent based. I think they just detected some js wasn't run by the browser. I don't have any godaddy account to try it out but I very often get captcha to respond on on websites with a message saying my browsing has been flagged as possible bot access. I am using ghostery on firefox.
- pessimizer 4y agoCloudflare has started kicking people who forge or don't send their referrers. I'm pretty sure they'll ban you (based on customer configuration) if your user-agent doesn't match their fingerprinting/probing.
- aussiedude 4y agoI wonder if they are using some Akamai bot blocking feature.
- rvnx 4y agoThis is because the browser fails to load some JS on the control panel because the browser blocks them. That's it.
- alias_neo 4y agoThis is an infuriatingly poor error message if the problem is disabled JavaScript. Surely they can detect that and show a proper error instead of trying to be cute with this "Your browser is a bit unusual" junk?
- Komodai 4y ago
- dang 4y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- pdw 4y agoIt's hard to differentiate between completely disabled JavaScript, some individual JavaScript files being blocked by an (overzealous?) ad blocker, and the browser not implementing some required JavaScript feature.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoEasily solved, by sticking to web standards and not using any experimental JS features. Still them to blame, not the client browser.
- jefftk 4y ago<script src="https://example.com/js https://example.com/js"> is not an experimental web platform feature.
- tannhaeuser 4y agoWeb apps were an error.
- SquareWheel 4y agoHacker News is a web app.
- brokenkebab2 4y agoThis website is optimized for Netscape Navigator again
- pluc 4y agoYou already shouldn't be using GoDaddy, so there's another reason
- usrn 4y agoThey're a pretty terrible registrar/host but their marketing is fantastically good. Every non-tech business owner I've met uses them. It makes me kind of sad.
- pluc 4y agoI don't get disappointed at neophytes using GoDaddy. People who know better though should know better. Nobody on here should be using GoDaddy.
- dmje 4y agoLike most things it's not as simple as that. I'm a long-in-the-tooth web guy (30+ years doing this stuff) and for Legacy Reasons I use GD. I wish I didn't, but all my domains (and all my client domains) are with them. Yes I could unpick, but do I have time / inclination? No. Do I want multiple domain registrars? No. So - yeh, agree in principle, disagree in practice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bigDinosaur 4y agoThat's fine, you just have to admit you're supporting an incredibly slimy business. That's okay, many of us do/have done that even when we don't want to, but at least you gotta tell others to offset your GoDaddy use. Two people swayed away from using it by your opinion should just about do it!
- wowokay 4y agoI think most business are slimy if you dig deep.
- mkl95 4y agoGoDaddy is a well-documented garbage fire. I used them once, then switched to Namecheap and I've never looked back.
- oriettaxx 4y ago> is a well-documented garbage fire as I asked above, can you elaborate this? I am not aware at all
- mkl95 4y agoA particularly egregious example is "Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303
- oriettaxx 4y agouh, but I see there is a clear response cited there, too https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy-felons-io-unregistered-domain/ https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy-felons-io-unregistere... anything else?
- TameAntelope 4y agoAll the way back to their Danica Patrick days they’ve been more focused on the bottom of the market (non technical users who don’t know better) than in providing a good product.
- V-2 4y agoWorks fine on Vivaldi (which is Chromium-based), unless the error is only supposed to occur after an actual logging attempt, which I can't test without an account. So I don't doubt there's a limitation, but it doesn't seem to disallow every derivative browser (assuming I'm not misunderstanding you somehow).
- jorgemf 4y agoVivaldi workarounds these kind of issues by identifying itself as chrome. When a site blocks vivaldi because it is not chrome the site is added to a list and it will identify itself as chrome in the future (I know because it happened with the web version of whatsapp).
- grishka 4y agoIt's actually a whitelist. Vivaldi always uses the Chrome user agent, unless it's a website known to not block it, like vivaldi.com, and probably some of their partners too.
- londons_explore 4y agoFraud rates of 'other' browsers are over double that of mainstream browsers. Nearly every metric is worse - from spam comment removal rate to adspam rate to credit card chargebacks. I can completely understand a web host deciding to block any browser that isn't a major one.
- stevesimmons 4y agoNone of that should matter if the services are only available to validated, logged in paying customers. And then you decide on the basis of the customer whether to block, not the browser.
- londons_explore 4y agoBut it turns out a bot can look very much like a logged in paying customer, just they're paying with a stolen credit card and you'll only learn that in 2 months when the chargeback arrives...
- smaudet 4y agoStill not a reason to block by browser, bots don't even use them... At any rate, based on what I've read this is a false alarm anyways, it's annoying and stupid but UA banning is not browser detection. This is more ass-covering - another commenter mentioned too many layers of abstraction which is probably closer to the mark - something broke somewhere and a customer complained, they don't have the time nor inclination, or perhaps even ability, to fix their issue, so they do the 'we don't know what's wrong, halp' thing, versus making a more robust site. Which fits my impression of their site, shoddy service with mediocre hosting services. Superbowl/pornstar marketing though, so everyone has heard of them, in comparison to aws (you have heard you can host godaddy even if you think Amazon is just a place to buy shoes, and Amazon is both bigger and better)
- rejectfinite 4y ago
- lapser 4y agoThis is such a weird comment. Many people use Brave for nothing crypto related. Metamask is just a crypto wallet. I'm a Firefox user and don't use Metamask, but your comment is very iffy.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
- dang 4y agoCould you please stop posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dzek69 4y agoVivaldi stopped exposing itself via User Agent, they're just telling they're Chrome. A lot of issues are magically gone.
- agotterer 4y agoI was using GoDaddy through Vivaldi yesterday without any issue. I guess this explains why, thanks.
- shireboy 4y agoI’m a Brave user and tired of Godaddy even if they fix this. What is the best alternative registrar? I just want names, possibly mail forwarding, not hosting etc.
- sackerhews 4y agoNamecheap or Google domains.
- sgbeal 4y ago> I just want names, possibly mail forwarding, not hosting etc. Another alternative is NearlyFreeSpeech.net. i'm using them simply for DNS with great results and fantastic prices. IIRC, if you _just_ use them for DNS it costs 1c per domain per day. If they are your registrar, that drops to 1c/3 days. i'm only using them for registration and DNS and it costs me about $1.20 per year. Their UI is... somewhat 1990s... but it works well and they have outstanding absolutely-zero-BS/marketing-speak docs (which was the thing which caused them to win my evaluation for a new registrar).
- timbit42 4y agoPorkbun has DNS and free email forwarding for 20 addresses. Less expensive than NameCheap.
- jefftk 4y ago> Only allows direct versions of Google Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox Where are you seeing that? The error message doesn't say that's the problem, and it's much more likely to be that Brave is blocking something GoDaddy uses for login.
- _notathrowaway 4y agoSpeaking of registars, what does HN recommend? I was a happy namecheap user until they decided to go all political against Russian citizens. I am unsure as to what service I should migrate to.
- usrn 4y agoI like easydns.
- mcintyre1994 4y agoI like gandi.net but have no idea of their political stance re Russian citizens
- 4cao 4y agoI've been using Gandi for years and can highly recommend them. They have great user interface that doesn't get in the way and waste your time (as opposed to GoDaddy, which at least back in the day when I was using them would be showing several pages of worthless "offers" you had to decline every time you wanted to just renew a domain name). Gandi also has excellent and easy to reach customer service (although I didn't get much chance to interact with them).
- up6w6 4y agohttps://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-one-internet-against-escalation-and-war/ https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-one... > Cutting off Russians and Belarusians would only encourage the creation of different closed worlds and digital networks. We have chosen to hold out our hand to these people. We are not at war with them. Only their leaders, and their madness, need to be stopped. We will of course react quickly against war propaganda of any kind. Few points that made me choose them (though I would probably take Cloudflare if they supported the TLD of my domains): https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit https://www.gandi.net/en/gandi-supports https://www.gandi.net/en/gandi-supports
- kruuuder 4y agoI'm a happy INWX customer.
- kypro 4y agoThis doesn't seem to be related to GoDaddy locking out derivatives of Chrome and is probably Brave / browser extensions blocking certain JS scripts. I can access my account fine with Brave.
- superkuh 4y agoThis has been my life for a decade now. As more and more sites become exclusively applications you run in a browser (instead of websites written in HTML you look at) I've been blocked more and more. Intention or accident, it doesn't really matter. The modern "web" is only for mega-corps and they're done pretending it's anything else.
- henearkr 4y agoRecently in GoDaddy, I've also had the "the 2-factor authentication key failed, try to insert it again" when I wanted to change important settings like the automatic renewal or the domain lock. The point is, I used the same 2FA key to log into my account, so I know it works. As a result I was compelled to do the intended actions through the phone by calling their support. Has anybody got the same problem? Are they trying to prevent people from freely modifying their settings, or is it that somehow they want to "fire me as a customer"?
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoIf they get you on the phone, they can tag you as a mark and upsell you.
- henearkr 4y agoThat would explain it, indeed... But that's a pretty dark pattern, isn't it? Do you happen to have some confirmation that they do it in that intent? Also, if this is the case, why don't we see more people complaining (here for example)?
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoBecause the victim would not be here (I'm trying to compliment you, here!).
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoIf you didn't get the upsell, maybe you "passed" for whatever their heuristics are :^D
- jakub_g 4y agoTo be pedantic, "locks out derivates of Chrome" is a bit of a stretched interpretation. What most likely happens is that there is some fingerprinting JS running trying to weed out bots; and as Brave has a lot of anti-fingerprinting measures built-in, some of the tests fail.
- bob1029 4y agoUser agent discrimination will never make sense to me. It's such a trivial thing to work around too. Are there legitimate use cases for describing yourself to the web, or could we all just hard-code the bullshit magic string chrome uses and be done with it? Ad tech is the only reason I believe this garbage continues. Maybe we can hope and pray for some kind of regulatory relief on the horizon. Alternatively, we can start building services the way we know they need to be built, and quit our jobs when our dickhead MBA bosses order us to do inhumane things with the products. If someone in my organization ordered me to do UA/browser filtering for our web application, I would likely quit out of protest. The primary reason no one asks for ridiculous things like this in my organization is because they are convinced that I actually will. I have made it abundantly clear to the business that certain areas of technology are no-go. Being assertive about this trash fast & early can keep it from becoming a thing in the first place. Clearly, not an option for every career & job, but developers are in such huge demand that they have a non-zero amount of control over this destiny now.
- duncan-donuts 4y agoI’d wager the primary reason they’re not doing it is they don’t have a use case for it (yet).
- 93po 4y agoI've never understood why browser fingerprinting is so easy. Your browser gives up so much information and it seems entirely unnecessary for it to be providing such unique values. I would have hoped Firefox would have done more to eliminate this problem. They do have a resist-fingerprinting-option but it both breaks sites and also still doesn't pass any of the online fingerprinting test sites.
- Darvon 4y ago
- aliqot 4y ago
- miedpo 4y agoHeya, just logged into GoDaddy from Brave without any changes here, and it worked fine for me. This might be for a couple of reasons: 1) Perhaps GoDaddy is running a change on you that they haven't rolled out to me yet. 2) Perhaps I have a somewhat long history on this computer logging in using brave and that is overriding whatever heuristics they are using for 'that connection looks suspicious'. Have you logged into your account in Brave on this computer before? If so, for how long have you done so? In addition, if you turn off some of the brave shield (look at the lion in the URL bar), does the site load? It might be detecting that and using that as the heuristic that doesn't let you in. 3) Perhaps Brave rolled out an update that broke something. Unusual, but happens occasionally. Are you running standard brave on Windows, and if you go to Windows->About Brave is it saying that your browse is fully up to date? As a note for all the people asking why people use GoDaddy, there are two things generally: 1) Sometimes, you didn't make the decision, and it's a pain in the butt to get things swapped over especially when your bosses are used to GoDaddy. 2) Their phone support is miles better than most of the competition. While sometimes you run into techs who don't help quite as much, sometimes you run into really good ones. This ratio of helpful : not helpful is quite a bit better than the competition. In addition, all of them are pretty understandable over the phone. (By the way, if any of you are looking to compete with companies like these, having good phone support really makes you stand out over the competition - you just have to make sure your support techs manage their support time well) These things make them more difficult to replace.
- hakube 4y agoHave you tried spoofing your user agent?
- gravitate 4y agoTurn Shields off?
- sergiotapia 4y agoLiterally who uses godaddy on purpose. Might as well buy an oracle database instance as well. use porkbun, great service that does one thing well. like postmark.
- itbeho 4y agoDo not use GoDaddy. A horrible company in my opinion based upon experience.