this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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What I'm scared is publishers taking this as a reason to simply start banning Firefox and other browsers.
Or google to lock parts of its ecosystem behind chrome only.
Yeah but can't you just get a thing that tells things that you're using chrome when you're not
Yeah I've got an extension for it, it just changes the user-agent string.
I use it on YouTube because for some totally not suspicious reason Firefox won't play videos but when I spoof it to Chrome everything works fine.
I've noticed significant YouTube quality degradation when using Firefox, but no issues with Chrome.
Got a link for the extension by any chance?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
User-agent is being deprecated, so it won't work forever.
Also note that if people keep their UA as Chrome permanently, hit counters will count them as Chrome users, and the number of Firefox users will go down.
What is that relevant to? Genuinely curious.
The comment I replied to was mentioning user-agent. User-agent is being deprecated (replaced by client hints) so changing the user agent will eventually stop working.
At the moment, the stats for browser usage rely on user agent as recorded by stats software used by various sites, so if you make Firefox pretend to be Chrome, you'll be contributing to the Firefox user percentage going down.
Right but why is that relevant? What good or bad does a number going down do? If Firefox wanted to keep track they could just count the number of downloads right?
The issue is that sites will have even less reason to support Firefox if the number of people using Firefox goes down.
Ah OK that makes sense. Thank you.
Not always doable as they could be relying on non-standard features that are only in Chrome.
Not exactly the same thing, but my employer requires us to use Chrome for all internal stuff, as they're using Chrome Enterprise Premium as part of their endpoint security solution, and of of course that only works in Chrome.
It takes more than changing your user agent to msk which browser you use. It's trivial to know which browser you're really using if they really want.
I'm pretty sure it's much easier to mask your browser than detect the correct browser. In the end you're just hitting a server for data, you fully control the call that is made.
There are things you can't do with extensions alone, like change how certain JS and CSS internals work.
Oh, publishers don't want my traffic? Oh, nooo...
Publishers don't care about traffic thay only costs them money.
An ecom site decides to block 5% of web traffic and potential sales?
Now tell the marketing team you are turning away 1 in 20 potential customers because (well, not really sure why) and see what they have to say.
There's already plenty of business web apps that require chrome. I specifically use a business focused web app that not only requires Chrome, but ONLY CHROME ITSELF and no chromium derivatives. That's the first time I've come across that. I had previously seen chrome requirements, but they worked just fine on ungoogled chromium. Not this one, nope. Regular Google Chrome and nothing else. wtf is that garbage.
You can get past these with a user agent, lying about which browser it is. However, they aren't testing for other browsers, so their site maybe as buggy as hell. As yet Firefox doesn't do a WINE and match Chrome, bug for bug, so sites work as intended. Google have cause IE6's return.
It was indeed buggy, which was when I reached out to support. They immediately asked if I was using not Google Chrome itself, but a Chromium offshoot like Brave or Vivaldi. I was using ungoogled chromium, so they told me it won't work. I switched to regular google chrome and it worked great. I wonder what on earth they're using that's part of Google Chrome that makes it work and not part of any other chromium projects.
Monoplistic web hell scape.