Is It Feasible to Detect Chrome?
4 by thejohnconway | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Recently, there has been discussion on Google's FLoC trial, and what developers can do you combat it. A lot of discussion is on the opt-out HTTP header, Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=(), which will disable FLoC for that website. I think this is a weak response, and would be more interested in getting fewer people to use Chrome in the first place. I have seen people say they are either going to block Chrome entirely from their site, or put a banner up, encouraging people to try something else. I would consider the latter approach, and have done a small amount of research into reliably detecting Chrome, so that I could put a banner on my site. The results are not encouraging. The problem is that Chrome-based browsers are very difficult to distinguish from Google Chrome itself. User agents are misleading (and Chrome is about to remove them anyway), and all the Javascript feature-detection methods I could find no longer work. Worse still, the situation is like this by design: Brave, for example, is deliberately indistinguishable from Chrome to minimise browser fingerprinting. So, is there a reasonably reliable way to detect Google Chrome?