Google rolls back buggy reCaptcha update after users reported issues in Mozilla Firefox

Google rolled back the recently released reCaptcha update after users reported issues with it in Mozilla Firefox. The rolled-out reCaptcha script apparently didn’t work for Firefox users on Windows.

The news comes via BleepingComputer which reported that it had received multiple complaints about reCaptcha stopping working on the latest version of Firefox. Additionally, users on Reddit and X further reported a similar issue.

A recent reCaptcha update released by Google caused issues in Mozilla Firefox

After internal testing, the publication confirmed that the recently released reCaptcha update indeed didn’t work in the latest Firefox version.

The reCaptcha prompt went on to an endless spinning circle as opposed to how it generally works. You can check the screen grab of the same below.

According to a bug report on Bugzilla, the issue was related to reCaptcha’s dark mode detection routine for Mozilla Firefox in Windows. The bug report suggests that the reCaptcha script tried modifying a div’s background using document.body.removeChild.

However, since the script was loaded in the HTML head, the DOM had not loaded yet, document.body was unavailable causing the reCaptcha script error.

That said, a temporary workaround for users was to switch their browser agent to one for Edge and Chrome. Doing this lets users use the reCaptcha again.

Responding to the bug report thread, Firefox’s engineer Denis Schubert confirmed the issue. He further added that Google has acknowledged the issue in their script and was not related to the Firefox browser. He adds:

Yes, Google is rolling out a fix. It seems to work in several of our internal tests on multiple continents, but we’ll keep this bug open until we’re sure it’s fixed for everyone.

Dennis updated the bug thread the same day and added that Google fixed the reCaptcha not working bug from their end.

Google confirmed that this was mitigated, so I’ll go ahead and close this bug as fixed. If someone is still seeing issues, please give it another hour or two, clear your caches, and test again. If this persists, leave a comment here and we’ll investigate.

Did you face a similar reCaptcha issue while using Mozilla Firefox on Windows? If yes, share your thoughts in the comments below. Also, don’t forget to leave a comment by visiting this page if you are still facing the issue.