The Dilemma of Web Browsers Lying About What They Are (in Order to Bypass Discriminatory Gateways Like Clownflare) Worsens Due to LLM Slop

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 14, 2025

LLM crawlers/scrapers have made sites more restrictive and hostile towards browsers that are potent but not "famous"

We recently published a bunch of articles about how Clownflare was screwing "small" browsers and users of such browsers. It's not just Clownflare; many sites do the same, even without Clownflare or with some rival of Clownflare. Their most common excuse these days is that LLM slop worries them; hence, collective punishment with collateral damage.

Are you nonconformist? They want you to suffer.

I received a relatively rude response from a Mozilla founder, according to himself, whose site I could no longer access. What I could gather from this reply is that I should either quit using Falkon or ask Falkon to "lie better" about what it is.

Me:

I cannot access your site anymore using Falkon. Maybe you can tweak the access rules?

Thank you,

Him:

It is impersonating Chrome 83, which was released *five years ago*. So, no.

Me:

Falkon is still more free than Chrome and LLM slop scrapers can impersonate anything, including permissible [sic] clients/user-agents.

Good sites do not sniff user-agents, nor should the back end have PHP, database etc.

In 2023 we went fully static. LLM nuisance stopped bothering us.

Best regards,

Him:

Good for you. I would suggest that impersonating a UA that is used almost exclusively by botnets is perhaps not in your best interest.

So my browser is now presumed "botnets" and is blocked. This comes after a lot of ranting by the above person about LLMs.

So that's yet another way LLMs ruin the Web, leading to fewer browsers still being in use:

Shouldn't a person who helped start Mozilla recognise the importance of browser diversity? Firefox used to suffer a lot from sniffers of user-agents. It was an adoption obstacle. █