this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023

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-69

Xenia wouldn't suggest that :c (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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please don't harrass or insult that website, but I recently browsed that website because I wanted to get a wallpaper, but then I realized the top bar was saying "Xenia suggests you get Firefox", wait what?? She wouldn't suggest that first of all, second, this means that the website knows if you are using Google or Firefox, so that can be a harmful addition. I will talk to the owner maybe, that is bad because all browsers can be good!! And that website is really pretty but I dislike that top bar.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 11 months ago

Every website knows what browser you're using unless you change your user agent to pretend to be a different one (although even that won't always work). The banner is a little weird, but it really is good advice, chromium based browsers are a huge danger to the open web

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Based Xenia suggesting browsers for an open and healthy web. Go Xenia!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Checking if the user is using Firefox is pretty easy:

CSS.supports('(-moz-user-input: none)') // only returns true in FF

[+] [email protected] -44 points 11 months ago (2 children)

ok thank you!! But why would the owner put that message?? We're all Linux fans so it doesn't matter what browser we use!!!

[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It really does, if we give Google a monopoly over the web browser market they have way more power to do things like restricting ad blockers and tracking users. Remember: Google is an advertising company, they make their money from collecting user data and serving targeted ads. Everything else they do is secondary at this point and they will absolutely use their other products to increase the money they make from advertising as much as they can

[+] [email protected] -25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

ok... well as long as they allow Firefox and the other browsers to be fine then that's ok, and teach people to use other browsers if they want to of course!!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Except that they've already displayed that they won't. Recently, Firefox users were targeted with an artificial delay on YouTube. When caught, they claimed it was about ad blockers... Except it didn't affect chrome users with adblock and affected Firefox users without adblock.

And this has happened multiple times over the years, where little headaches and inconveniences would crop up on Google services, all of which could be fixed by changing your user agent so the site thinks you're running chrome.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I though the delay thing turned out to not be true. Or did I misread something?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

They admitted they were slowing users with ad blockers, but many Firefox users reported experiencing the slowdown regardless of whether they used an ad blocker.

The article I linked, however, says that they couldn't get the delay to happen at all, so it's entirely possible it was just so poorly implemented that it was affecting people almost at random.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Chrome, and browsers based on it, currently account for more than three quarters of web traffic. This gives Google a huge amount of power over the web and how people are able to interact with it. Google is also a company who's primary business is advertising and surveillance; this means they have every incentive to curtail your ability to stop websites from spying on you and force you to use the web on their terms. They're currently exercising this power with the rollout of Manifest V3, where they're severely limiting the functionality of content blocking extensions like uBlock Origin.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh neat, we commented pretty much the same thing at the same time. I feel like yours is better written though

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Damn, what are the odds?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's clearly a play on the fact Xenia is a Fox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I know of one Fox, and he is Fox McCloud.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Your UserAgent string

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Every site sees your UA lol. Dont use Google Chrome. Why would you, use Brave or Ungoogled Chromium if you need to.