How to get rid of "Access Denied" messages.

Dell indeed uses Akamai/Edgesuite.

There are addons that might make the navigations look suspicious but given you specifically mention this also happening in troubleshoot mode that has all the extensions disabled, this could point to a miscalculated block unless your IP address has bad score for some reason.

If you can also verify using a temporary new profile, and eventually downloading Nightly for a separate test, the next course of action would be either uploading screenshots of few of the blocks, or directly filing the reports per site in bugzilla quoting the reference IDs returned on the 403 blocks so that complaints are submitted for these. Thanks!

I created a new profile and had no problems; should I copy the stuff from my old profile to the new, or rebuild the profile from scratch?

jbr is likely to answer.

Personally I would start from scratch.

and copy over parts of the old profile, keeping backups of the new one. You may discover where the problem lies and have an idea on how to avoid any similar problems

What is loaded in troubleshooting mode, but is not in new profiles, is mainly session data.

Might be worth trying to either "Clear cookies and site data" from the shield icon next to the address bar for the malfunctioning sites, or selectively remove the data for the domains affecting your from the site data management pane, see: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1588761#answer-1827079

jbr, I created a new profile from scratch. I also cleared the cookies and such for dell.com. I'm still getting the problem. What do I try next? ?": (Note: FWIW, it works on Chrome.)

"I created a new profile and had no problems; "

" I created a new profile from scratch. I also cleared the cookies and such for dell.com. I'm still getting the problem."

So when did it happen again?

This is somewhat tricky. If it didn't work in fresh profile, there would be ways to escalate — but seeing the different behavior between profiles might mean it's something trivial, e.g. old settings–related (like, changing config for media playback, webgpu, webrtc, anything tinkered with while improving something seemingly unrelated months or even years ago) ~ which now the bot protections deem as trying to tamper with their evaluation:(

Might be something like a protocol or cipher suite disabled in the past that now stands out etc. …

Do you use any VPN by the way? Or have e.g. Malwarebytes scan your secure connections?

I have the default Firefox VPN (the free one).. I'[ll give it a try. Also, I had some other problems, so I refreshed Firefox and the other problems went away--but not this one.

By this one, you mean the original post 'Access Denied' issue

That's right--I still get the "Access Denied" message. I don't get it on the site's home page, nor on a page it links to, but I get it when I click a link that should be clickable on that second page..

Unless it's behind a login, could you share the set of URLs here that you navigate sequentially to help retrace the steps? Thanks.

Could you also please clarify:

1. "I created a new profile and had no problems"
2.  "I created a new profile from scratch. I also cleared the cookies and such for dell.com. I'm still getting the problem."

Did the new profile work at first, but eventually also started exhibiting the same? Or you're still able to reach the pages in the new profile and the issues are isolated to just the original profile?

Had the VPN any effect?

First, I created a new profile and copied everything over from the old one; I ran into the "Access Denied" problem. I then created a new profile from scratch, but had the same problem. I had some other problems, so I refreshed Firefox; the other problems went away, but the "Access Denied" problem remained.

I also used the free Firefox VPN, but got the same negative result.

Ah, okay if it never worked even in a clean profile there's not much that can be done — Akamai/Edgesuite just doesn't trust the connection for whatever reason. You can of course experiment and try downloading e.g. the separate Firefox Nightly nightly.mozilla.org to see how they deem that as admissible or not, given it might have a slightly different signature.

This can be escalated to Akamai, but you'd need to provide some response codes extracted from the requests etc., feel free to open a bug analogous to these:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1920099
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1967922

as there's no prior report for Dell. Or at least when you're on that broken page, please do "Report Broken Site" from menu, as that will capture some of their error logs and submit that along with the report for QA to check. Thanks!