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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Webmasters should really fight back and show annoying popups when the user agent equals Chrome. These popups could nudge the user towards e g. Firefox.

Perhaps EFF.org could provide a reference implementation of such popups.

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Serious question: does the concept of a webmaster still exist in 2023? Sites are developed and built in dtap, deployed by gated processes, and in many instances nobody but the deployment agents have access to the actual production servers.

It has been years since I ever heard the term “webmaster” indeed, but I guess the point was “people who are in control of websites”, and not the concept as we knew it from the 90s (“that one dude who manages our corporate website”).

Maybe not, but you could be in a bit of a bubble regarding the average website deployment method. In my experience as a webdev most website are still very much deployed in a way that’s controllable by those who would put up such an alert. The problem is rather political. Any organization with a website relevant enough to make such a popup worthwhile would never agree to have such a popup alienating its largest share of visitors. Small independent sites would, but they would be pretty much preaching to the choir.

For large organizations, there are two ways to limit consequences for individual webdevs:

1. Get fingerprints of the browsers of your superiors (or simply use IP addresses), and don't show the popups on those browsers.

2. Let the script be hosted by a central authority (say eff.org), so they can activate it centrally and the popup appears on many websites at the same time, which will make you look less bad.

My aunt was one of the first "webmasters" in Denmark, getting their municipality information online. In Danish, aunt is "moster", so when she helped me and my mom make a website for my mom's business, the footer said "Webmoster" instead. She also helped me set up an e-mail. I called myself mats_pc, because having PC in my name like she did felt cool and techy. Only later did I realize she had _pc as that was her initials after getting married. So I basically changed my name to hers, hehe. Good memories.

Web development is still wildly varied in execution. I think we can end up with blinders based on our work, but websites still get deployed in ways that would make a webmaster role relevant. Not sure you would call them a webmaster these days, but the role is there.

"We detected you are using an insecure browser. Please upgrade to a secure browser such as Mozilla Firefox." would do it. :)

Punishing users for the browser they use when it can render the site perfectly fine is so hostile. They may not even have the choice of browser installed on the machine they use.

/More/ popovers and popups?

What about just making the site slower?

If you're going to do something in protest, people have to know that you're protesting and that you want them to take an action in support of it.

And if you degrade their service, they won't blame Chrome, they'll blame you.

Well, you could do both :)

"You are using a slow browser, please upgrade to Firefox for a fast experience"

Okay, perhaps that is a bit underhanded, but you get the idea.

I think the "Stop SOPA" banners are a good model. I think people are already suspicious of Google, I don't think they'd need all that much convincing to try switching to Firefox. After a week, at least half will have switched back, but that's just how it goes.

For popups I blame the website developer, I read these as "let me give you a small annoyance to push a personal opinion" => ctrl+w

I think you can tell people other ways that you degraded their experience intentionally. I guess I’m actually fine with popups too. The goal is to make Chrome known as the slow browser so people stop using it.

This is one of the ways Chrome obtained its market share. I remember years back when working at one of the biggest Flash/HTML5 game platforms at the time, we where paid serious money by Google to include a banner to switch to Chrome when we detected a different browser.

Some one suggested using the WEI API to block access to chrome. It wouldn't really work but it was amusing, until I realized the censorship potential of the whole thing on the world stage.

I added one last month already :)

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