Arc is almost 3 (4?) years old and was the darling child of dev influencers for the better part of 2 years. It's not a niche browser, especially amongst devs that are likely to work at Cloudflare.
It's definitely a niche browser. I think I heard of it once on HN over the past few years, and I'd be surprised if there was actually more than a few thousands of people using it.
> Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users.
I don't get your reasoning here, you shouldn't even expect more than a fraction of the reddit users to have even installed and tried the browser, let alone using it regularly.
I would be surprised if it were that low; the arcbrowser sub Reddit has 50 thousand members. Still, regardless of the actual figure, I think there's a broader point which avoids the need to agree on an absolute threshold: should cloudflare block access to websites using a blacklist or should it grant access using a whitelist? Especially since it's trivial to spoof your user agent.
That's fair. I'm sure it's not as well-used/known as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. Probably not even Opera, although I'd be interested to see their respective "new users" numbers. I think it's in the same ballpark as Brave — definitely known, just not one of the big 5.
I'm still not sure how some random browser should result in a block by the provider. I don't think there's any security risk for the provider of the site by using an outdated browser. Blocking malicious IPs yes/maybe, blocking suspicious acitivity maybe. But because you have browser X - please not.
This is going to lead two a two-class internet where new technologies will not emerge and big players will win because the gate the high is so absurdly high and random that people stop to invent.
Well i've certainly never heard of this browser before and it still seems pretty young. I'd guess it's the same issue.