It's not necessary targeted like that. Remember Chrome sends a lot of information about the user, allowing them to more easily gauge if it's a bot. Firefox hides a lot of information, blocks a lot of third party scripts by default, and even sends fake information for some things. For all intents and purposes, Firefox looks much more like a bot than Chrome.

With that said, I use Firefox exclusively and don't have anywhere near as many issues as you seem to.

Google's service using Google's servers isn't a conspiracy against you or your browser. Firefox and CAPTCHA work just fine, unless you specifically enable the settings that break CAPTCHA.

The whole point of CAPTCHA is to check if you're a robot or not. That's done through two ways: solving challenges designed to elude robots, and through behavioural analysis because most robots are extremely basic when it comes to their clicking behaviour.

Back in the day, clicking fire hydrants and entering unreadable letters were all we had. You always had to do it, every time you logged in or submitted a form. Google then decided to make the experience less annoying by trying to determine your bot status through behavioural analysis; fields being filled instantly, without scrolling, items being clicked that are off screen, and a million other signals that are known to Google alone.

You've opted out of this behavioural analysis by enabling a wide variety of privacy measures. That's good for you, and good for your privacy. It also makes you indistinguishable from a bot. That means you'll have to offer some other proof that you're human.

Google is trying to push the web integrity framework as an automated way to prove your state, but everyone but Google hates that. Cloudflare has an automated CAPTCHA bypass tool based on anonymous tokens that you install as an addon, but obviously nobody wants that. Apple has built this technology right into Safari, but nobody has noticed.

You can pick between passive privacy infractions, solving CAPTCHAs, or avoiding websites with Google's CAPTCHA. It's not some big Chrome conspiracy, it's a result of how the technology works.

Keep in mind that basic bots don't render or process certain page elements - like javascript. So VPN plus noScript/uBlock plus obscured data plus no preexisting cookies and possibly unique fingerprint from all your previous interactions (depending on your privacy settings)... It all adds to possible bot behavior. In my mind, getting caprcha'd is a good thing. It may mean google has low confidence that it knows who I am.

You may have turned on a setting in Firefox that is meant to obscure your browser fingerprint. For me, it seems to force more captchas for me.

I kept the feature on though, because when I signed into Google and got the notification of a new sign-in on my phone, it thought my OS was Windows NT (it's Linux) so it seems to at least kind of work.

I forget what the setting was off the top of my head (in about.config I think), but could look into it if anyone is curious.

Edit: went and found info on it. It is not just "Enhanced Tracking Protection." It is specifically about blocking your browser fingerprint: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting

I just use captcha buster extension in Firefox, captchas are just stupid and it makes more problems for humans than for robots.

My experience was that when solving captchas where you select pics on the grid and other pics load and replace the selected ones within the same round. in firefox it tends to play those fade-in fade-out very slowly. while on chrome they appear instantly.

Unfortunatly I can't expand my obveservation just based on my own anecdotal experience. have you noticed the same behaviour ?

I don't think it's browser specific or a direct targeting of Firefox; that's likely confirmation bias. I see rolling captchas and the annoying ones that have a delayed fading in and out even on Chromium forks. I think the biggest reason for seeing them is VPN usage. When I turn off my VPN, I either don't see any captchas or it just automatically shows the green check when I start them.

The thing that annoys me so much is why every damn website has to depend on gOoGle scripts to function. E.g : most of website depend on googleapis or ajax.googleapis. why don't you just stop hotlinking everything to 3rd party shits. This is basically spread Google's domination on web. Remember, those 3rd party libraries are not Free. They take visitors data and make you dependent on their services. So Google has become the gatekeeper of many websites.

I have a website and I coded everything by hands. No 3rd party JavaScript and other 3rd party BS. It makes my website run so damn fast

Do you use a VPN by chance? I get really annoying CAPTCHAs with my VPN on.

Google doesn't like things that make the user less identifiable, so they strike back however they can without it being too obvious.

Google's ReCaptcha in version 3 works in the background. Instead of displaying images of crosswalks and such, it uses a kind of risk score. This risk score is based on user behavior: If someone has behaved like a human in the past and thus gets a low risk score, the captcha is passed without you having to do anything or even seeing it.

I assume that Google uses data from it's own services, web analytics applications and usage data from Andoird devices and Chrome for this. Of course, this is not without its privacy issues but it's convenient.

That's weird, I use Waterfox and I occasionally get to do some kind of "puzzle", but other times I just need to click the reCaptcha and it will confirm itself (with the green check)

Ironically, when I use Vivaldi, the captcha doesn't even load, and when it loads, it says it's wrong regardless of the answer I give it, so I'm always locked and that's quite literally the only reason I stopped using Vivaldi.

On Edge I need to fill in puzzles ALL THE TIME, that's also why I stopped using Edge (apart from the bloatware and the uBlock not working there)

Yeah, it's true but with https://github.com/dessant/buster I don't give a fuck with their reCAPTCHA xDD

I deal with that BS all the time, although I don't have the issue when I don't use a VPN

Jeez, just faced the forever recaptcha a couple of days back. I used Firefox web and the recaptcha was a sold 5+ kinds (select cars, buses, motorcycle, signals...). I kinda half thought that it was some sort of gag after seeing it go on for what seemed like forever. Thankfully I made it through and it will not change my decision to stick with Firefox.

I disagree. I'm using Brave all the time and get everytime these annoying captchas. I never had a situation where I had not captcha. My guess it's because of my configuration (I hardened Brave totally). In your case I'm guessing Google is just using Cookies, or fingerpriting to know that you're already solved a captcha recently to prevent you from seeing one again, while ur Firefox config is maybe to strick for this.