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Qutebrowser Cloudflare Issues, and fix

I love the way Qutebrowser works and have got used to the speed and way of browsing.

Some sites seems to block it purely based on the fact it is not Chrome or Firefox, or a derivative.

The main issue is sites check the user agent string and then compare to a deep check of the browser system to see if they match. If you get it even slightly wrong they will block you.

The solution for me, was to check the version of the engine

:version
Which will display a page including all the browser information. The critical bit is at the top

qutebrowser v3.7.0
Git commit: 
Backend: QtWebEngine 6.11.1
  based on Chromium 140.0.7339.225
  with security patches up to 148.0.7778.96 (plus any distribution patches)
  (source: api)
Qt: 6.11.1

The based on Chromium is readable to websites, so you need to match your user agent in your config file.

c.content.headers.user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/140.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'

If these match it seems to solve many of the bot protection pages and also speeds up the hidden checking even they worked before.

It's a simple fix but I imagine it will need updating when the browser updates, so keep an eye on this if problems arise.

Posted

07:37 15/06/2026