> Ok, then it could be played a little harder, for example by introducing a (small) performance penality for visitors that use chrome.

Good luck convincing your product owner of the necessity of that change. Most large enterprises won't do something like this.

That's not the place to target such a change, if anyone's to do it.

If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective.

If there's no support from a major maintainer, then simply writing contributions which are largely tested in firefox for performance but are tested in Blink for mere functionality should succeed over time in inducing the same.

In the end, the libraries are lock-in for larger SaaS providers far more than they might be aware, and if such changes start making it into e.g. React, there's not all that much that many product teams can do to work around it other than replying via support channels that Firefox seems to take less of a performance penalty.

That's the black hat in me talking. Resuming white hat status now.

No need to blackhat; rather than intentionally degrading it for one browser, just optimize for the other. I'm reasonably confident that there are areas where FFx is more performant; use them.

> If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective.

That library will get forked by industry.

If its license does not permit forking, it's incredibly unlikely that it can get traction in the first place.

You could just add more intrusive ads to your site. The site owner will be thrilled, and the users not thrilled at all. It would work very well for all concerned!

Well, apparently, all you'll need to do is put ads on your site and people will probably start switching ;)

I really do appreciate the kind of symmetry behind the idea of "Google ads for Google Chrome users, freedom from ads for free software users"

Ignore the "proven by experience" pessimist comment.

Yes we can, go ahead and do it. This is a "Do not do X" nudge not a "Do Y" command.

It is proven by thousands of years of history that humans are best served by negative commandments.

Most sites and content are monetized by ads. Your suggestion is to slow down the browser that allows those ads to exist? What publisher would accept this?

Then you simply lose users. How do they know Chrome is the reason your site is slow when others’ aren’t?

Well, if we're fighting fire with fire, they know because you put in a little dialogue on the page that says, "switch to Firefox for better performance".

We have that already! Except it goes the other way; using non-Chrome on Google properties gives you a slightly worse experience. YouTube on Firefox desktop is still terrible.