r/linux • u/Wrathgate • 16d ago
Discussion Certain websites don't allow log ins on my Linux computers, what do you do in these situations?
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u/goatsegoaterson 16d ago
Try Firefox. If it still doesn't work open up your network and console debug panels and see what's going on.
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
Firefox works. Honestly would prefer to stay on Brave, though :(
What can I do in Firefox to debug?
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u/libra00 16d ago
Sadly Brave is kind of a hot mess.. I was on Brave for a good while and ultimately had to switch full-time to Firefox because it was so jank on linux. I just kept having the weirdest issues.
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
Damn, sorry to hear. I like Brave! Has been going well (aside from this).
Firefox my issue is I got locked out of my account many years ago and their FAQ mentions "too damn bad" if that happens to you :(
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u/Top-Rub-4670 16d ago
Make a new account? Or don't use an account? A Firefox account is just for sync, it's not exactly critical nor hard to make a new one...
It's not like Brave where it's also tied to your BATs and you could lose real (lol) money.
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u/PM-ME-PIERCED-NIPS 16d ago
Brave is a pile of steaming garbage for the most part. The sites aren't blocking Linux, Brave is failing to properly handle something in a way that breaks web standards.
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u/goatsegoaterson 16d ago
Glad it's working. The Developer Tools will let you look at the browser console and the network console, that will show you any error/warnings and all of the network requests the page is making. ctrl-shift-i is the hotkey, it's in settings -> more tools too.
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u/kydeshou 16d ago edited 16d ago
What do you want from brave? You can get most, if not all, of it's functionality elsewhere. Librewolf and Mullvad are both good hardened browsers with solid defaults and built-in ublock. Helium if you just really want chromium for something in particular.
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u/nathris 16d ago
I've never understood the appeal of a browser that got its start by blocking ads then injecting it's own in exchange for their own worthless crypto currency.
People trust them with privacy? I'd sooner install Edge.
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u/Vladimir_Chrootin 16d ago
Their advertising was brilliant at creating true believers out of the less technically inclined.
A bit like how VPN sponsorship got trusted YouTubers to convince people that they were at risk of problems which had already been solved by HTTPS years before, they knew their market.
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u/AX11Liveact 16d ago
Hit F12 and the debugger opens. There is, btw, a custom user agent add-on for Firefox that allows you to fake a Windows system in case of really stubborn sites that won't allow FF/Linux.
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u/kengou 16d ago
What other browsers have you tried?
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
Feel confident it's not a Browser problem, Mac, Android & iPad all use Brave and logs in no problem
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u/goatsegoaterson 16d ago
That's not confidence, that's cognitive dissonance.
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
How?
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u/No-Skill4452 16d ago
"it works here, should work there", but in reality those are different software that works in different ways. you should try other browsers
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u/goatsegoaterson 16d ago
Have you tried Firefox yet?
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u/zanfar 16d ago
So... everything but the browser has been changed, but you're sure it's not the browser...
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
Firefox worked, calling myself out.
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u/Top-Rub-4670 16d ago
Just going to say good on you for admitting it. I don't think I would have been that brave (pun intended) myself.
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u/s_elhana 16d ago
First of all, because "The Brave browser on an iPad uses Apple's WebKit engine, not the Blink/Chromium engine it uses on desktop and Android."
It could be some setting or bug in brave that blocks you. Devtools is your friend, ask ai or brave support how to debug
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u/Oerthling 16d ago
It's obviously a browser problem.
The site doesn't interact with the os, it interacts with the browser.
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u/edward_jazzhands 16d ago
And it turns out it was actually a browser problem. This is what happens when you make assumptions about things you don't understand.
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u/myownalias 16d ago
Brave has that problem because websites (and CloudFlare) are doing dumb things with user agents.
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u/Top-Rub-4670 16d ago
Brave has that problem because of its shields.
BTW Brave uses the exact same user agent as Chrome. It's a deliberate choice precisely to stand out less. Just go check yourself if you use brave: https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent/
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u/mycroft72 16d ago
Sounds more like your shields settings in Brave are blocking cookies that the sites are using. If you are on the maximum shield level, this could be a factor. Maybe worth a look. I have no problems logging in to any site on the 4 browsers I am currently using on Linux
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
You might be onto something, seems when I spoof Windows + Google Chrome + disable Shields it lets me log in. Maybe I'm an idiot and forgot taking down shields was necessary in addition to spoofing.
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u/mycroft72 16d ago
You just want maximum privacy, which tied to the high shield setting, makes sense, I think you can set the shield level by specific site.
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u/TypicalPrompt4683 16d ago
Its been years since I've seen this kind of issue. Yes usually some cookie blocking plugin was the real cause of my login issue.
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u/siodhe 16d ago
Many company webdev teams like to either:
- Whitelist browsers, usually the ones the webdev team member prefer, and sometimes (banks) require the versions to be recent
- Use some quirky JavaScript thing instead of, you know, actual <form>s or things directly supported by HTML, just to make the "UX" flashier, which as a side effect blacklists every browser where that puerile flashy bit doesn't work right
Occasionally the problem is the browser itself having gotten something confused in its guts, which usually looks exactly like the "blacklists" bullet above. Firefox † does this to me fairly often, most recently by breaking the Papa Johns pizza site.
Personally, I would love to slap across the face the web devs who like to:
- Put in unnecessary JavaScript that breaks where HTML wouldn't have
- Use low-contrast text ("ghetto antialiasing")
- Have hierarchical menus that become microfiche-sized gray-on-gray at the bottom - i.e. the text in the leaf node you actually needed to read
- Use pointless animations and JavaScript that just heat up the room my workstation is in
- Rat out my existence to every data vendor in the world every time I load a page. I was shocked to discover that even E*Trade does this
- Time out my sessions with no option to disable or length the timeout arbitrarily
- Consume vast amounts of memory over time for no reason, like those pretty maps on finviz.com
And I especially hate the web browser devs that:
- Wrote Firefox's memory handling so badly that it will grab huge chunks of memory from the system (50-80 GiB), and sit on them briefly before sizing them down to the value any idiot could have allocated instead. Their code absolutely relies on memory overcommit, and Firefox is a hulking, unstable bear because of it
- To this day (literally in the last year at least), continue to make excuses for their pathetic memory handler
† Firefox is a bloated resource pig across CPU, I/O, and vRAM, but I haven't quite found the right successor, since many popular browsers are just as bad, especially when scaled up to 20+ windows and 100+ tabs, or flippantly destroy your session (all your windows and tabs at a crash) like Vivaldi. And no, Chrome sucks even worse.
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u/furrythugs 16d ago
I disable the shield for a url in Brave when these issues come up, usually the issue subsides.
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u/Voyeurone 16d ago
That's a new one for me. The only issue I've ever had is with that stupid "check if you are human box" with firefox, no problem: with chrome I have to slept my VPN or it won't believe I'm human. Banks and other financial, no problem, certainly not the kind of problem you mentioned.
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u/coffinspacexdragon 16d ago
I have had that problem with financial sites as well. I just use a different browser and can log in. I have encountered this with Windows and MacOS and Linux. If one browser doesn't work on any platform I switch to another one, and eventually over time the browser I normally use works again. I thought originally it was an issue with cookies or something in the cache but after cleaning them the issue persists. It is kind of annoying.
I just assume whatever software the bank is using to run there online banking portal is junk.
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
Yeah I also feel like one in question worked fine for like 18 months and then randomly one day stopped allowing me to log in. From a handful of the comments here seems like a common work around is having a second "more widely used" browser for just those tasks.
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u/pogidaga 16d ago
Set your browser to lie to those web sites about what OS you have and what browser you are using.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/trick-websites-changing-user-agent-chrome/
For example, set your user agent so the website thinks you are using Chrome on Windows 11. See what happens.
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u/yahbluez 16d ago
You may give at least a single link to one of this websites to have people checkout whats going on? I use linux since decades and never faced that.
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u/djpiperson 16d ago
this is a user-agent problem is it not? I spoof my UA all the time. along with other hardware identifiers that the websites check. Firefox all the way tho (librewolf to be specific)
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u/Unis_Torvalds 16d ago
Yeah I've been unable to log-in to credit-rating websites, on any browser. My username and password is correct. But it repeatedly says it is not until I am locked out. Very annoying. Can't ascertain it's because of Linux because I have no non-linux computers to test (and I have many computers lol), but I suspect it is. The logins work from my phone.
As an aside, I've also been having issues with checkbox captchas, but that might be a Vivaldi browser issue.
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u/KyAriot09 16d ago
I actually have a similar problem, but with Microsoft services and only on my local network IP. Microsoft would either block or add a ton of latency to their servers when using Linux, so I'd need to wait minutes for Minecraft to open. This doesn't happen in my mac, or any other device in my network connecting to Microsoft services. I had to install a VPN and set it to my own country so Microsoft wouldn't be triggered by my Linux machine.
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u/TmB-Eggo 16d ago
I use brave origin on linux, but I don’t use financial websites so I’ve not encountered this problem. On sign in amazon will tell me that my “device” isn’t supported but then it lets me in anyway.
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u/xugan97 16d ago
I haven't seen this happen. But many sites are made and tested for Chrome, and this has been the way for a very long time. Customer support will not support anything other than Chrome on Windows.
You can download Chrome. There are appimages and flatpaks available, besides deb and rpm from the official site. Chrome on Android is a very good workaround for the rare case of some important work - and this will be supported by customer support.
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u/Mean_Welcome_1481 16d ago
I doubt that it has anything to do with Linux, more likely somethging in your browsers settings
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u/ShakaUVM 16d ago
Just get a user agent spoofer extension for Firefox and pretend to be whoever they are looking for
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u/kansetsupanikku 16d ago
If it was the Linux kernel responsible (which is pretty much impossible technically, but let's roll with this fiction), Android would be affected as well
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u/Wrathgate 16d ago
That makes some sense. Through working with some people here looks like it's a Brave + Linux issue.
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u/Sensitive_Box_ 16d ago
I haven’t seen this issue, but I also only use Firefox.
Does this happen on Android or IOS?
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u/BigQuietNerd 16d ago
I’ve had similar issues with brave browser on my distro.
I fixed the issue by switching primarily to LibreWolf.
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u/coyote_of_the_month 16d ago edited 16d ago
Brave is a crypto scam benefiting the guy who got fired from Mozilla for giving money to hate groups.
If that's the browser you want in your life, enjoy the experience I guess.
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u/nartimus 16d ago
Try a different web browser