I use Firefox whenever I can.
On first install of the browser I usually end up following a hardening guide which includes stuff like blocking cross site cookies, setting a few things in about:config to disable Pocket/etc, and installing uBlock Origin. I’ve taken what I consider a relatively balanced approach, I don’t use anything like noScript, uMatrix, etc that ultimately just cost a lot of time fiddling to get the 10th website of the week working.
I’ve been more or less fine browsing the web this way for years, but around the start of 2024 I’ve started seeing way more “Access Denied” pages than I used to. I think part of it is Cloudflare or similar, but I don’t know exactly what’s changed or what’s triggering it to occur.
It usually goes away and I can re access the site in 10-30 minutes as usual, but I’ve had it occur in really weird instances, such as trying to change my Minecraft skin and getting blocked by the website. The server block often goes away immediately if I switch my user agent, so I know that it has something to do with how I’ve got everything set up.
Not sure what anyone else’s experience with this has been. I’d like to hear some of your thoughts and tips
Apologies for the late response!
I’ll echo similar thoughts to what I said in another comment. Librewolf, Mullvad, and other privacy based browsers are going to be a double-edged sword. You can take me with a grain of salt but these types of browsers actually do make you stand out in terms of fingerprinting. They have their own unique signatures, and the more you tweak the more you stand out too. Does it protect your privacy? It’s really hard to tell, there’s no data to suggest one way or another that I’m aware of. But, these changes are going to make you more likely to be challenged by captcha and blocked by sites in general.
I wish we didn’t have to try and solve this type of problem. Privacy should be a right.