Is it possible? Yes. Is it ethical? Depends on the goal IMO. One could well argue that making a site that works better with Firefox or other libre browsers and puts some roadblocks on Chrome is ethical as carrying out a defensive measure, not only for you but also for those around you.

I’d say no, for two simple reasons.

One: Websites should be made to the web standards and not for a specific piece of tech. Would you ask people to rework everything if Firefox magically became the “new Chrome” in a few years? Isn’t the main idea of this place to be better than the corporate dystopia we’re all trying to avoid?

Two: Fediverse IS NOT big enough to purposefully screw up people’s experience in an attempt to force them into changing their browsing habits. This would do more harm than good in the eyes of many potential users. Do you really think they would be willing to switch browsers they used for years just so they can check out a platform that’s smaller and with less content than its corporate counterparts?

Don’t punish - explain, convince and (if you have the know how) work on making a switch easier for an average user. That’ll not only be more productive but also bring more willing and potentially active participants.
That’s how I feel about it at least.

Terrible idea. You don’t combat bad behavior with bad behavior. We just had Global Switch Day and now we’re talking about this which is the complete opposite of encouraging growth. How does this make it the open internet?

I remember in the 2000s there was something on Mozilla’s own website that said something like “we do not support or endorse icons that say that a website is best viewed in Firefox; we believe the web is best viewed with any standards-conforming browser”. Not sure if that is still there somewhere. So that is a fairly authoritative answer as to “ethical”; in any case now that all widely-used web browser engines are FOSS, why would you want to push people to any of them?!

It would probably be possible by testing the software more extensively in Firefox.

I don’t see that as a particularly good idea. One not really sure if it’s possible. To my knowledge the only things that majorly run better in chrome, are google’s sites. May be part deliberate, but could just be super tuning to what they know.

But the biggest thing is lemmy is a small community that is best to encourage to grow. Fact is doing things to alienate part of your user base, is only really a good idea when you are the industry dominitor. IE the one so far ahead that you can make everything 20x worse, and second place can do everything 20x better, and still not fall into range of the second place competitor.

No.

Its pretty hard to purposfully make a website behave badly in a specific browser. And there is a lot of people on low powered devices who probably run chrome as its faster and people on chromebooks and the like,