Unsupported browser

Browser Support Web Compatibility
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My apologies in advance if this isn’t an appropriate category for this issue, which is of a political rather than strictly technical nature.

It seems an increasing number of web-sites are censuring users of brave browser with messages about it being an “unsupported browser”, presumably due to being starved of their precious data.

One example is facebook.com (Brave Browser 71.0.58.21, on gnu linux 4.15.0-43-generic amd64), though I’ve encountered others I can’t recall off the top of my head at the moment.

My shield settings are custom, but should not affect the ability to view or use any of the sites in question from an end-user perspective.

I don’t know if the sites would work with different shield settings. I’m not interested in compromising my privacy/anonymity in order to find out.

This is not a technical support question/issue, but instead a political issue. It’s something other browser vendors like Opera have faced in the past. For instance…

http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/desktop/opera-releases-bork-edition

It would seem wise to come up with a political strategy to mitigate this type of prejudicial censuring of brave users before it becomes the norm. Particularly given that non-technical users are unlikely to understand that it’s not a technical issue with the web-browser, but instead a political move on the part of surveillance capitalists to discourage users from protecting their own privacy and anonymity on the web.

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I have absolutely no problem browsing facebook using brave version 0.58.21 Chromium: 71.0.3578.98 (Offizieller Build) (64-Bit)

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On the off chance it was an extension, such as an adblocker, I tried disabling all the extensions I use, but it continues to occur. The relevant http headers are as follows.

  1. Request URL: https://www.facebook.com/
  2. Request Method: GET
  3. Status Code: 302
  4. Remote Address: [::1]:8118
  5. Referrer Policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade
  6. Response Headers
  7. content-length: 0
  8. content-type: text/html; charset=“utf-8”
  9. date: Fri, 01 Feb 2019 11:05:20 GMT
  10. location: https://www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser

Short of throwing fake User-Agent headers at it to figure out if I can hack my way past, I’m not sure why it would affect me and not you, but that’s what’s going on. To be honest, I don’t care about visiting facebook. It was just an example. I’ve been seeing this sort of thing more and more often lately, though my normal response is simply to avoid using any sites/services that censure my choice of browser. This post was just meant as a heads-up. Do with it as you will.

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