Your Browser Probably Lies To The Big Sites (Blame Chrome) | Hackaday

Skip to content

When you visit certain large sites in Firefox or Safari, the browser may detect your visit and change its behavior. It could be as simple as lying about its identity, or it may totally change how it renders the page. But according to a post by [Den Odel], this isn’t a conspiracy between browsers and big Internet — rather, it is a byproduct of Chrome’s dominance.

Here’s how it goes. Chrome puts out a new feature and everyone rushes to implement it on their site. Maybe the new code breaks other browsers. Maybe the other browser supports the feature, but the website doesn’t detect it correctly or is unaware. Maybe it just relies on some quirk of Chrome. Regardless, Firefox and Safari will change to match the site rather than mess up the user’s experience.

If you want to check it out, Firefox will show you what it does and let you disable specific fixes if you visit the about:compat URL. For Safari, you’ll have to read code from a file named quirks. Bugzilla tracks the fixes for Firefox, if you want more details.

Browsers are huge and complex so even niche browsers, today, usually use one of a handful of rendering engines. It seems that the question isn’t if a big company should control the way the web works. It is more a question of which one is currently dominating.

10 thoughts on “Your Browser Probably Lies To The Big Sites (Blame Chrome)”

Yes it’s Internet Explorer’s type enshittification all over again.

Report comment

Reply

What goes top of my head is that why people are still using Chrome. I really don’t get it.

Or be it other Google services..

Report comment

Reply

The alternatives are . . . Microsoft, or Apple (or the complete fragmented mess that Desktop Linux is)? Microsoft is objectively crap, and I just don’t get Apple at all lately, the UI now has a swipe up and pause before lifting finger mechanic.

Completely non-intuitive. My Android still has a virtual button to bring up the running apps list, still works fine. Come on Apple.

Report comment

Reply

I’ve been using future exclusively for years now, but recently started using Brave Browser, first on a new android tablet, then also sometimes on my Debian laptop. Like anything, there are certain things that bug me a little (it does the to be a little memory hungry), but I’m pretty happy with it overall. Who knows what’s gonna go down with Firefox now, but for now either Brave or Firefox would be more better than Chrome or whatever garbage MS is serving now (I quit watching).

You do still have choices.

Report comment

Reply

Isn’t Brave just Chrome in different clothes?

Most of the alternative browsers are based on Chromium, so that’s not exactly an alternative, just a re-skin of what Google is doing.

Report comment

Reply

There is a difference between Chromium and Chrome proper, so it isn’t quite just reskinning Chrome, as some extra building blocks are placed on top of an identical foundation to create them all. I do agree they are not all that much of an alternative though.

Report comment

I’m having a terrible time with chrome mobile on a Galaxy Fold 2 (it could also be just some terrible websites).

Problems range from buttons and UI being drawn off-screen, to using ‘desktop mode’ being detected as ‘hacking’ by Cinemark and the website being completely inaccessible (yes I have my DPI set at 420, the resolution is higher than half my desktop and laptop PCs).

I understand how we got here, 16 years ago the Nexus was a 3.7″ screen with 480×800 pixels, the web was best serving a mobile version. But today my phone has 180CM^2 screen area vs my first tablet (Nexus 7) at 142CM^2, now I do nearly everything on my phone and websites should just serve me the desktop site if I ask. Although some rely on stupid mouse-over tricks as part of the UI 🤦🏼‍♂️(facepalm)

If Chrome mobile would let me set my user agent it would go a long way.

Report comment

Reply

I miss the internet.

Report comment

Reply

"I miss the internet."

This….

Report comment

Reply

I miss the WWW.

Want to be part of and contribute to a game’s community?

Forget it. Forums are dead, non-existence or if it exists you can’t create an account there – only login via FB or Google. (No, Reddit is not an adequate alternative for a proper forum.)

Oh and if you lower yourself to Reddit all posts have non-titles that say nothing relevant about the actual content – meaning equal to ClickBait because you have to click to even learn what’s it even about.

Expecting others to search before posting is frowned upon… but the garbage titles don’t contribute to search-ability anyway.

Some /r/ literally remove rules against double-posts.

Discord is "on" the Internet but not the WWW (it’s a closed system not searchable from outside – at least some IRC channels were stored and made public – not to mention public mailing lists).

YouTube is a money grabbing ClickBait dumpsterfire....