I get the same slow animations with Chrome. I don't know what the point of it is, since it's apparently trivially bypassable, but I don't think the goal is to annoy people.
Also, the web would be much more annoying to use without captchas. (Not necessarily recaptcha, but just the concept in general.) If you've ever been an administrator of a site that's prone to spam, it's usually one of the only effective options. Other trade-offs would generally involve blocking huge ranges of potential users, with tons of false positives, or laborious manual approval which isn't feasible past a certain scale if it's just you or a few people.
I get tons of recaptcha on google search, basically everytime i open firefox incognito, surprising how it never happens with chrome. Google is doing many anti-competitive things with chrome.
> Also, the web would be much more annoying to use without captchas. (Not necessarily recaptcha, but just the concept in general.)
This is a non sequitur; we're talking about Google's abusive faux-captcha (which is not actually recaptcha; that's the two-word OCR challenge captcha they replaced with said faux-captcha), not about any actual captcha or captchas in general.
Sorry, you're right, I think my error was due to the start of the parent:
>Because fuck them. Recaptcha in particular
I think I read it at that moment as "because fuck [captchas]. Recaptcha in particular". But they meant Cloudflare and Recaptcha.
I will say, as annoying as Recaptcha is, I find hCaptcha a lot more annoying, difficult, and time-consuming. (Cloudflare recently switched from Recaptcha to hCaptcha.)
I failed 4 "select the motorcycles" yesterday after selecting like about 7 - 8 of 18 images per try. So that's minutes spent clicking 28 - 32 out of 72 squares, and I failed every time, because I don't know much about bikes/vehicles and they mixed in regular bicycles and other semi-motorized bikes (which were all wrong answers), and many of the images were extreme close-ups of possible axles or handlebars with no clear shapes, and others were just generally blurry, unclear photos. It makes Recaptcha's ultra-slow fade-ins seem like bliss. I got the fifth one when they switched from motorcycles to something else, but that one wasn't easy, either.
> as "because fuck [captchas]. Recaptcha in particular"
Ah, that makes more sense, and now I'm not sure that wasn't what they meant (although it seems unlikely because fuck Cloudflare).
I'm not familiar with hCaptcha, but what I've heard (including from you just now) suggests that it, like Google 'captcha', is also a javascript-using non-captcha, in which case fuck them too.
Also, the web would be much more annoying to use without captchas. (Not necessarily recaptcha, but just the concept in general.) If you've ever been an administrator of a site that's prone to spam, it's usually one of the only effective options. Other trade-offs would generally involve blocking huge ranges of potential users, with tons of false positives, or laborious manual approval which isn't feasible past a certain scale if it's just you or a few people.