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.
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.