The Pale Moon web browser runs in an infinite “verifying your browser” loop on sites that use Cloudflare’s Browser Health Check feature.

I have confirmed the problem in the latest versions of the Pale Moon browser. Some sites constantly display the “check your browser before accessing” page. There doesn’t seem to be a way around this at the time of writing, and the issue is discussed in various places including the official site pale moon forum but also the Cloudflare Support Forum.

The message that appears on the infinitely reloading page may differ, depending on how the site has implemented the feature. SteamDB, a popular database site for the Steam gaming platform, shows the current message during browser health checks.

It’s unclear why the infinite loop is happening, as Cloudflare hasn’t released an official statement. One user suggested it might have something to do with the user agent that is revealed to sites when pages are loaded. Pale Moon includes a reference to Firefox 68.0 in the user agent for compatibility purposes. Firefox 68.0 is an older version of Firefox, released in June 2019.

The lead developer of the Pale Moon browser posted a comment on Cloudflare’s community website, stating that the browser also permanently identifies itself as Pale Moon. Indeed, the latest version of Pale Moon identifies itself as such in the user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/5.0 Firefox/68.0 PaleMoon/30.0.1

Cloudflare’s parser may object to the Firefox part, as this version is old and no longer maintained by Mozilla.

It seems from the discussion on the official site that this issue is not resolved. If so, it would have a significant impact on Pale Moon’s internet compatibility. Pale Moon users might try spoofing the user agent to see if that allows them to pass the test.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Install it User agent state extension for Pale Moon and restart the browser.
2. Click the extension’s icon in the status bar and replace the Useragent string with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:100.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/100.0.
   1. Note that you may need to adjust the string to keep up with the latest versions of Firefox.
3. Activate the “Set UA” button.

The browser should pass Cloudflare’s integrity check and the actual site should load correctly.

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