GoDaddy locks out derivatives of Chrome

Heya, 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.

User 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.

93po · 4 years ago

I'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.

duncan-donuts · 4 years ago

I’d wager the primary reason they’re not doing it is they don’t have a use case for it (yet).

miedpo · 4 years ago

andybak · 4 years ago

"Your browser is a bit unusual".

Why, yes. Thank you for noticing. That is entirely intentional.

Welcome to the web.

abirch · 4 years ago

Too 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

ytjohn · 4 years ago

I have a user agent switcher extension for Firefox. I have a linux machine for development work, and a Windows imaged laptop for email. There are some work related sites I have to switch the agent for. I know one of the sharepoint sites was arbitrarily "locked down" to Windows only, so I report that I'm running Edge on Windows.

sshine · 4 years ago

You would do that rather than change domain provider?

jefftk · 4 years ago

The way you assume that responsibility in this case is by unblocking the JavaScript GoDaddy requires.

aaaaaaaaata · 4 years ago

Easy version of this is a FIDO2 hardware key.

rvnx · 4 years ago

This is because the browser fails to load some JS on the control panel because the browser blocks them. That's it.

alias_neo · 4 years ago

This 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?

mike_hearn · 4 years ago

The error message linked from the post says "Try disabling ad blockers, enabling JavaScript or using a different web browser".

pdw · 4 years ago

It'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.

Dead Comment

bob1029 · 4 years ago

dzek69 · 4 years ago

Vivaldi stopped exposing itself via User Agent, they're just telling they're Chrome. A lot of issues are magically gone.

agotterer · 4 years ago

I was using GoDaddy through Vivaldi yesterday without any issue. I guess this explains why, thanks.

okasaki · 4 years ago

I'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 · 4 years ago

adblocker / 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.

Yes, 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.

mkl95 · 4 years ago

GoDaddy is a well-documented garbage fire. I used them once, then switched to Namecheap and I've never looked back.

Siira · 4 years ago

Namecheap locked my free DNS account for “security” reasons, and told me to contact them to unlock it. After contacting them, they advised me to open a new account. All this on a service that doesn’t let users export their data.

Perhaps they aren’t as terrible in their non-free offerings, but I doubt it.

timbit42 · 4 years ago

I was using NameCheap but found Porkbun is less expensive and has an easier website.

b3lvedere · 4 years ago

I had never heard of Porkbun, so thank you for that info.

oriettaxx · 4 years ago

> is a well-documented garbage fire

as I asked above, can you elaborate this? I am not aware at all

A particularly egregious example is "Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303

TameAntelope · 4 years ago

All 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.

jakub_g · 4 years ago

To 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.