Google was forced to roll back a recent reCAPTCHA update because a bug caused the service to stop working altogether in Firefox for Windows.
According to the publication Bleeping Computerat the end of last week many users in in social networks and on Reddit complained that reCAPTCHA stopped working in Mozilla Firefox. Journalists tested reCAPTCHA on their own devices and made sure that the service really does not work in Firefox.
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Instead of a reCAPTCHA challenge, the screen displayed an endlessly rotating circle.
According to Mozilla bug report, the issue was related to the dark mode detection procedure in Firefox for Windows. So, the script tried to change the background color of a div using document.body.removeChild, but since the script was loaded in the HTML head, the DOM had not yet loaded and document.body was not available, which ultimately led to an error.
As a temporary solution to the problem, users could change the browser user agent to the one used in Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, and then reCAPTCHA would work correctly.
Mozilla Firefox Engineer Dennis Schubert wrotethat Google developers admitted that the problem arose due to their script, and not the fault of the browser, and the company is already working on fixing it.
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“Yes, Google has released a fix. It appears to be working, according to our internal tests on different continents, but we will keep this bug open until we are sure it is fixed for everyone,” Schubert said.
Shortly after, Google rolled back reCAPTCHA to an earlier version, eliminating the bug for Firefox users.
Although some users were quick to see what had happened Google's intentit looks like it was indeed a mistake.