Comment by al_borland 2 days ago
Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.
Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.
Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome
Btw, the 'website requires chrome browser' problem is often solved if you just make Firefox user agent say it is Chrome.
There's one site I have to switch to Firefox for. And it's a big one that handles a lot of money, so that's kind of surprising. Can't log into their site in chrome, no matter how hard I try. Nor edge.
Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.
By that logic attempting to change anything at all is not viable; e pur si muove.
>the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome
History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!
There's no detour for politics.
>like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently
But that was the whole point. They were marketing to children. They still haven't recovered from that backlash. Anheuser-Busch took a pretty damning financial hit and it sent a message to all the other companies not to pull this kind of stunt because it's bad for business. Changing their behavior was the entire point.
> History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another
The South African apartheid regime was brought down by boycotts.
The Israeli genocide regime will suffer the same fate if there is any justice left in the world.
Boycotts are very powerful. Users boycotting ads is dismantling the surveillance web.
South Africa didn’t have the U.S. Government and its allies actively propping it up, and punishing anyone who tried to boycott it.
The history is a little more complicated than this…it is true that South Africa was eventually sanctioned by the US for its apartheid policies, and this helped lead to the end of apartheid. However, the US supported South Africa during much of the Cold War period as a bulwark against communism. Some US politicians were willing to look the other way when it came to apartheid before support for South Africa became increasingly politically difficult.
“Sorry, we don’t support any browsers other than Chrome”
I agree exploiting a bug isn’t a sustainable solution. But it’s also unrealistic to think switching is viable.