What's the story with “Checking Connection Security” website loaders?
I'm encountering websites that load with a "Checking Connection Security" loading messages.
I'm certain it's some kind of dark pattern, but I can't figure out why a site would want to hijack the page load, instead of doing whatever work is happening in the background.
They're executing javascript to ensure e.g. you're not running in a headless browser. If you loaded the page and ran it in the background then the person making the request already got access to the page content, it's too late.
Gitlab does this and sometimes it takes 3-5 seconds. But navigating directly to a repository page bypasses this check.
helps prevent fraud, bots, spam, etc without forcing the user to solve a CAPTCHA