How to block Google Chrome

I received requests from a few webmasters some time ago asking me if there was a way to block Google Chrome from their website (some websites depends on a special browser). This article shows you how you can do this in Apache or PHP.

How to block Google Chrome in Apache

Before you can block Google Chrome in Apache, you will need to know the "User Agent string" of Google Chrome. A typical example is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.23 Safari/533.4

There is a User-Agent string list for all browsers.

To block Google Chrome in Apache, we should adjust the settings in httpd.conf. If you have no permission to access httpd.conf, you can create the .htaccess in the top web directory of your site.

An example of a .htaccess file with rules to block Google Chrome is as follows:

BrowserMatchNoCase Chrome CHROME
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=CHROME

Don't forget to restart your Apache server if you modified the httpd.conf file.

Now, when you visit your website in Google Chrome, you will get a Forbidden error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access xxxx.htm on this server.

How to block Google Chrome in PHP

To block Chrome in PHP is very easy, the User-Agent string is stored in global variable $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], we can find the keyword "Chrome" in this variable. An example is as followers:

<?php
if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) )
{
  $t_bIsChrome = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Chrome');
  if ( $t_bIsChrome !== false)
  {
    echo "Sorry, this website isn't compatible with Google Chrome.";
    exit;
  }
}
// Do something...
?>

If you have better way to block Google Chrome, please leave your comment.

Other resource about block Google Chrome

• How to block a website in Google Chrome
• Block Google's CHROME-Browser from vBulletin
• Google Chrome official site
• Webmasterword: Can I block Chrome users
• Google Webmaster Central
• Block cookies in Google Chrome

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