Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?

I've used vultr.com for years with no problems. Recently it wouldn't let me login without solving a Google captcha. I tried private windows, etc and ended up having to cancel my Vultr account and ask for a refund. Fortunately I only used them to spin up test VMs and didn't have any production stuff running there.

I refuse to pay a company for service and then be required to identify motorcycles and traffic lights every time I sign in. I went a few rounds with Vultr customer service and they said (paraphrasing) "It's not something we can fix, you have to talk to Google about it". Right... Google forced you to put their captcha on your web site.

It's an archive.is issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

Archive.today / Archive.is / Archive.ph issues the past few days. Safari Private w/iCloud Private Relay. See the enterprise free tier exceeded messaging:

  This site is exceeding reCAPTCHA Enterprise free quota.

That’s new, but problems/loops aren’t.

It doesn't work in Chrome either (please complete CAPTCHA/yes you're valid/repeat), it might be a config issue on archive.is (Firefox latest windows, Chrome 151 windows - guest/null profile on both) rather than a war move.

Yup, I get stuck in a loop.

Sometimes the audio recaptcha works. But, most of the time I can't understand the garbled audio.

Closing the tab always resolves the problem.

archive.today doesn't use a real recaptcha, the cloudflare page isn't real either. it serves that as a punishment for using 1.1.1.1 DNS because the owner doesn't like that 1.1.1.1 doesn't send EDNS client subnets.

I do not think that this is Firefox specific, more likely is is something Linux specific.

For me, hCaptcha has stopped working immediately before last weekend, regardless of the site that uses it.

It goes in an infinite loop, despite solving correctly all challenges.

On Linux, I have tested with 2 browsers, Firefox and Vivaldi, and the browser did not make any difference. I do not use any ad blockers, nor any non-standard extension.

So I think that they deployed a version update last Friday, which for some reason is broken on Linux.

It would not be surprising if both hCaptcha and Google ReCAPCHA have made some similar changes, so now they are both broken on Linux.

Meanwhile, some other "Captcha" applications from other vendors, which are used on other sites, still work like before.

I've seen weird situations where I'm objectively solving the captcha correctly yet it still doesn't recognize it as correct.

At this point captchas need to be completely removed everywhere. They aren't effective and just waste time.

Anyone else getting this?

Ich bin kein Roboter. Diese Website überschreitet das kostenlose reCAPTCHA Enterprise-Kontingent.

I am not a robot. This website has exceeded the free reCAPTCHA Enterprise quota.

Dunno, but is anyone else continuing to seem to get what feels like 3-4 minute reCaptcha challenges? I’m getting mentally exhausted having to try to solve the super blurry pick-the-streetlights they keep throwing at me in loops.

It feels like I have to go slowly through it only for it to eventually end in a “please try again” as I sit and wait ten seconds for each square to slowly fade in a new stupid bus for me to click.

How is this fair to the humans?

Not sure about Firefox but lately, if I access Google from Safari on my Mac with Apple's private relay on and private mode Safari, I get an endless captcha loop.

The open secret: the CAPTCHA wasn’t actually being checked against Google’s servers; any answer was accepted as correct – until yesterday, when someone armed with this knowledge launched an AI crawler. Now it’s being checked, so you’ll have to solve it.

because of my privacy settings google search outright blocks me as a bot. the only way to search is through an intermediary like startpage. related because if it does give me the time of day i tend to then get endless captchas.

I frequently have this issue with Safari in private browsing.

Yes. I use Firefox in Linux, with or without private window. Switch to Chrome to test and voilà, all good.

This has been happening since many months.

Yes , it (somehow) worked for me when I used VPN for a few days before not working again

PubMed and PMC use Recaptcha and it's atrocious. It never works with Firefox. It keeps looping even when filled correctly.

NIH support staff is even worse as they refuse to acknowledge the issue and reply with a scripted useless response.

If I remember correctly, Recaptcha doesn't work on GrapheneOS either which is a separate issue.

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