"Your browser may not be compatible with all the features on this site."

I have been seeing the following banner popping up from time to time on various websites across the Internet.

Your browser may not be compatible with all the features on this site. Consider upgrading to a modern browser for an improved experience.

This bothers me for a number of reasons.

Since April or May, I have been having trouble with the latest versions of Firefox on my 13-year-old Dell Latitude E6500, so I have been forced to downgrade to version 84. The Tor browser, which is based on Firefox, also has the same problem, so I am now using an old version of it too. Yes, I know I should be using updated browsers, but given a choice between old versions of these two browsers and a browser based on the Chromium engine, I will pick the former without hesitation. I refuse to aid Google's takeover of the Internet. Unfortunately, I do not even know of another privacy-respecting non-Chromium-based browser that will natively access the Tor network. I may soon have to resort to running a Tor service on my computer and enabling a proxy in some other browser.

The problem I experience with newer versions of Firefox is that they freeze my computer within minutes, to the point where my only option is shutting it off by holding down the off switch. This happens on all 3 or 4 Linux distributions that I have tried since this began. My computer does not approach anything close to 100% of CPU or memory usage before these freezes, so this does not seem to be a simple case of hardware insufficiency. I have also ruled out bad RAM. Kali Linux running Firefox 84 seems to be the least susceptible to the problem, but even Kali freezes occasionally. This seems to happen more on some websites than others. For example, I had to switch from Protonmail to Tutanota's email service a couple of months ago when my computer began freezing within seconds of accessing Protonmail's revamped website via the Tor browser and it became clear to me that Protonmail had no intention of fixing the problem.

Apparently, I am not the only one having these problems with Firefox. In fact, users have been reporting Firefox freezing their computers for years. Firefox just seems to have poor quality control, so I do not expect this to change any time soon. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Firefox shed 46 million users between the end of 2018 and the second quarter of 2021, despite its privacy features that are superior to Chromium. I think I will just have to do my best to work around this Firefox issue because I have not found a viable alternative that is not based on Chromium.

I realise that even huge companies like Microsoft are now incapable of coming up with new browsers that can compete with Chrome. Of course, this is their own fault for expanding the HTTP standards to the point where they are now millions of pages long. This reminds me of the short-sightedness of one of my bosses who suggested that I make several versions of the simulation I was working on and was not at all concerned by the increased cost of code maintenance. By all accounts, out of control web standards have made developing new browsers that people will actually use nearly impossible. The problem is now so bad that a few people have gone back to spending their time on the Gopher network that was largely abandoned in the 1990's when HTTP came into existence, and others have built a simpler network called Gemini on which to put their personal websites.

The point of this article is not Firefox's problems or companies' incredible short-sightedness in creating a figurative rock that they cannot move, though those issues are annoying enough. My complaint is with the banner and what it represents. First, it appears to be the same on multiple websites, a thin brownish orange banner at the very top of the page. It looks like something that has been standardised. This worries me because it means someone may be making a coordinated effort to force users off of any browser not based on Chromium. Hopefully, this banner is simply the result of the same laziness that website developers annoyed me with a decade or so ago when they produced numerous corporate and government websites that only worked with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

I think Web developers' and their managers' lack of concern for the people who visit their websites is the major reason the Internet is now so user unfriendly. Narcissistic website developers annoy me when they do not see anything wrong with trying to tell me what browser to run on my computer. What gives them the right to try to force me to use their bloated, privacy-infringing browser of choice? And, how can they claim that a browser version that is less than two years old is not a "modern" browser? Or, are they simply implying that any browser that is not based on Chromium is not modern? No technical reason exists for websites only working with one browser, and I have thoroughly proven that to myself by making dfdn.info work with a wide variety of browsers and very old versions of browsers. I want my websites to be accessible to old computers on slow Internet connections. (This is also one of several reasons I use the venerable Gopher and the new Gemini protocols. They're fast, efficient and use little of a user's data plan. And unlike the typical modern website, the information density is very near 100%! I have successfully tested with Firefox versions as old as 2.0, which was released in October 2006. I was surprised to discover that dfdn.info actually runs faster on a Pentium IV laptop from 2002 running Firefox 2.0 than it does on the Core 2 Duo T9600 laptop I use every day running Firefox 84. I see no reason that almost all of the Internet cannot be easily accessible by Internet users with twenty-year-old technology, and I will not join the rest of the web developers who do not seem to care that they have created an Internet that is too expensive for many people around the word to use.

We should all be very concerned if some websites are indeed implying that anything other than a Chromium-based browser is now obsolete. The prospect of an Internet that is only accessible with Chromium-based browsers should horrify everyone. The web was specifically designed to allow a wide variety of browsers and other applications to flourish. The last thing we should want is Google controlling how we access the Internet, and this has been widely discussed all over the Internet for years. So, why are Internet users not heeding the warnings? How have we allowed ourselves to come so close to the point where only browsers based on code written by Google will be able to access the Internet? Why are more people not supporting Firefox sufficiently for them to fix their quality control issues? I understand why Internet users are not using browsers like Dillo or Seamonkey that do not support a large number of websites or crash every five minutes, but why is my browser of choice for the past two decades now in danger of becoming just another of those browsers? I know Mozilla has been having funding problems forever, but why have more people not used Firefox and other browsers when they still had a chance of preventing Google from becoming perhaps the most powerful Internet gatekeeper of all? I do not have an answer other than that at least 81% of Internet users seem to be too apathetic to care. Will they care when Google gains the power to make the web one of its brand names, Web-by-Google TM, and begins charging all web users monthly fees?