this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
1019 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
60082 readers
4022 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.