“Checking your browser” never finishes

Close every other tab and reload the page. On a machine stuck at this screen that single change clears it more often than anything else you can do, and it works because the thing the interstitial is short of is processor time rather than bandwidth.

What the interstitial is doing

It loads a script, runs work in your browser, and posts the answer back. The work is a mixture: arithmetic, some rendering, and a set of measurements of how your browser behaves under it. Then it either redirects you to the site or reloads itself and tries again.

The reload is the tell. A challenge that reloads has not decided you are a bot; it has failed to get an answer and is retrying. A challenge that has decided shows you a block page instead.

Why the answer does not arrive

• The processor was busy. Extensions, other tabs, a background update, thermal throttling.
• The rendering was slow. With software graphics, everything the challenge draws goes through the processor.
• A script it needed was cancelled by a blocker, so a step never ran and nothing timed out cleanly.
• Its storage write was refused, so even a successful answer could not be recorded.

Reload, refusal or error — telling the three apart

The screen looks similar in all three cases and they need completely different responses, so it is worth ten seconds of looking before you change anything.

• It reloads itself, repeatedly, and the spinner starts over. No answer arrived in time. This is the deadline case and everything on this page applies.
• It sits still and never reloads. A step of the flow did not run at all — most often a cancelled request. Look at your blocker rather than at your processor.
• It replaces itself with a refusal, an error code, or a page saying access is denied. A decision was made, which means an answer did arrive and was judged. Speed is not your problem; the request is. That is the address and the ranked rows, not this page.

The four changes, in the order that works

1. Close every other tab, then reload the challenge. This alone clears it more often than anything else on this list.
2. Turn hardware acceleration on and restart the browser fully. Your reading's graphics row says whether this applies to you.
3. Turn off extensions for this page — or open the site in a window with extensions disabled — and reload once.
4. Allow cookies for the site so the answer can be stored when it does arrive.

How long should it actually take?

On an unloaded machine the whole thing is over before you have read the sentence on the screen. That is the design: the interstitial is meant to be a flicker, not a wait.

So the useful threshold is behavioural rather than numeric. If you have had time to notice it, read it, and become annoyed by it, it has already failed at least once — the screen you are looking at is a retry. Sitting through further retries does not improve the odds, because nothing about the machine changed between them. Change something and reload.

What if it is stuck on every site?

Then stop looking at any individual site's settings, because the thing all of them share is either your machine or your network, and you can tell which in about a minute.

Try a second browser on the same machine. If it also hangs, the problem is the machine or the connection, not the browser's configuration — extensions and per-browser settings cannot both be at fault in two different browsers with different extension sets.

Then try a second device on the same network. If that hangs too, it is the network, and the most likely cause is a resolver or filtering appliance in front of everything — a household blocker, a router-level filter, a corporate inspection device — cancelling something the challenge needs.

If the second device is fine, you have narrowed it to one machine and the execution budget row is where to start.

Firefox and Safari behave differently here

Two browser-specific behaviours account for a large share of interstitials that hang on one browser while another works fine on the same machine.

In Firefox, strict Enhanced Tracking Protection and resist-fingerprinting each change what the interstitial can do. Strict mode may block storage the challenge needs, and a coarsened timer changes the measurements it takes of itself. The shield icon in the address bar disables protection for one site, which is the right-sized test: if it completes immediately afterwards, you know exactly which setting to narrow.

In Safari, cross-site storage is restricted by default and is not something you turn off per site in the same way. What is available is Settings → Privacy → “Prevent cross-site tracking”, temporarily, for the site you are stuck on. Safari also gives no useful signal when a challenge fails to store anything, so a loop there is more often a storage problem than a speed one.

Why the page will not tell you what went wrong

Because a message specific enough to help you would be specific enough to help the thing it is defending against. “Checking your browser” is deliberately empty of information, and so is the refusal that sometimes follows it.

That is a reasonable trade for the site and a miserable one for you, and it is the entire reason this site exists: to translate a screen that is designed to say nothing into a ranked list of things on your own machine, each with something you can do about it. Nothing here has any inside knowledge of a vendor's rules — it reads the same browser they read and tells you what it found, which is a different and more honest offer.