Solved Stuck at "Checking your browser before accessing www.ecosia.org"

philipashby

Only on Vivaldi is Ecosia not getting past this check... Edge is OK and works fine at home on both...

What am I missing or is this a Work PC issue?

Any help gratefully received!

philipashby

Reverting to the latest stable build has resolved this for me!

DoctorG

@philipashby Check your Vivaldi Blocker if it blocks too much on Ecosia page.

philipashby

@DoctorG Thanks for the reply.

Blocker is not blocking Ecosia.org and I have added this as an exemption... No joy

philipashby

503 service unavailable?

Eggcorn

@philipashby said in Stuck at "Checking your browser before accessing www.ecosia.org":

Only on Vivaldi is Ecosia not getting past this check... Edge is OK and works fine at home on both...
What am I missing or is this a Work PC issue?

Are you saying that Vivaldi on your work computer has this problem, but it works fine on your home computer?

philipashby

Correct... Just started to occur a few days ago... Works fine in Edge at work...

Eggcorn

@philipashby I see. If this is only happening to Ecosia, the easiest solution would be to just use another search-engine.

philipashby

@Eggcorn Currently using Google until I can resolve the issue!

Eggcorn

@philipashby Did you try the standard troubleshooting steps?

philipashby

@Eggcorn Tried all those steps to no avail! Mystifying...

Pathduck

@philipashby If it's your work PC my guess would be a VPN/Proxy doing this, Ecosia seems really finnicky about what kinds of requests it accepts, for instance a non-standard User-agent or similar will throw a 503.

Eggcorn

@pathduck What if he set his user agent to Chrome, think that would fix it? Usually, Vivaldi uses Chrome's user agent. But I think Ecosia is one of the few sites where Vivaldi uses it's own user agent.

Pathduck

@eggcorn Good point - I just checked with a search, in 5.0 Stable it seems to use the Vivaldi UA:
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.137 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/5.0.2497.38

However in 5.1 Snapshot:
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.60 Safari/537.36

That might be a bug though, or maybe Vivaldi's love affair with Ecosia is at an end?

But for instance Curl will send a non-standard UA (curl/7.81.0), throws a 503.

$ curl -IX GET "https://www.ecosia.org/search?tt=a1b7da50&q=test"
HTTP/2 503

Sending Vivaldi's UA:

$ curl -IX GET -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.137 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/5.0.2497.38" "https://www.ecosia.org/search?tt=a1b7da50&q=test"
HTTP/2 200

So it seems Ecosia does some checks that the client is an "accepted" browser, probably checking some other headers as well, maybe client IP. Proxies might set a different UA header.

philipashby

@Eggcorn @Pathduck I used an extenstion to set the UA to Opera 12 (that seems old!) and the page functioned just fine.

Nice find on the stable vs snapshot... Not sure what I can do until a new snapshot is out... maybe go to stable for a while.

Cheers!

DoctorG

@pathduck With 5.1.2553.3 Snapshot i do not get any troubles on Ecosia with Cloudflare and Ecosia search works nice.

And it works with internal daily 5.1.2553.10.

Pathduck

@doctorg Me neither - no problem in Snap or Stable. It was just something I found, it shouldn't matter much.

But if definitely throws a 503 for non-standard UA's like Curl so that's a theory.

@philipashby Check in Devtools>Network what UA is sent by Vivaldi. Also check what headers sites see:
http://www.xhaus.com/headers

philipashby

@pathduck

The same by the looks of it!

xhaus:

Devtools:

DoctorG

My UA sent to Ecosia search page is
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.60 Safari/537.36 and all works nice.
And these sec-ch-ua headers:

sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="98", " Not A;Brand";v="99"
sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0
sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"

I checked with 5.1.2553.3 in Developer Tools with many strange user-agent and sec-ch-ua* settings and never got a block.

DoctorG

@philipashby Blocked cookies?

Catweazle

Ecosia don¡t work well with the adblocker enabled, this is clear because uses this to finance the trees. But I don't use Ecosia (it's Bing search), because image search don't work for me.

alt text

Most I use Startpage, Disroot and Metager