> 3. ProtonVPN: Good on paper, totally untrusted and blocked by the internet. I can't navigate without filling 10 captchas or just be outright blocked.
Even residential IPs are being blocked nowadays, we have Cloudflare to thank for that.
Yes! I run Firefox on Linux and I constantly get captcha'd everywhere (by that typical cloudflare loading page) because I'm not part of the 95% that runs Windows or Mac. Cloudflare is an awful thing for the internet.
cloudflare seethes at firefox users that have strict tracking protections enabled. OTOH it's still much less violent than hCaptcha or google. Especially if you install their PoW pass extension.
It might be because I tweaked my user agent. I had to do this, because Microsoft is being obstinate and disabling a lot of M365 features if you're on Firefox on Linux. When I set my UA to Edge it suddenly works totally fine. I'm just a bit stuck with M365 due to my work, unfortunately.
It's not really "big tech slavery", cmon. A large majority of bots on the internet try to fake their User Agent to pretend to be someone else. Unfortunately, your browser does the same. When they compare your browsers signature with the expected user agent and real user agent, they find discrepancy and flag your browser as suspicious.
The real solution is to only modify your user agent for the MS apps you have trouble with, and all your captchas will disappear.
No they don't because I had them too before I started using M365 and had to edit the UA. Maybe not as much, but I think the tracking protection also has a lot to do with it like another poster said.
Even residential IPs are being blocked nowadays, we have Cloudflare to thank for that.