Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systems
Attached: 3 images Today I learned that YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux. It will give you lowered video resolutions. If you just replace "aarch64" with "x86_64" in the UA, suddenly you get 4K and everything. They literally have a test for "is ARM", and if so, they consider your system has garbage performance and cripple the available formats/codecs. I checked the code. Logic: Quality 1080 by default. If your machine has 2 or fewer cores, quality 480. If anything ARM, quality 240. Yes, Google thinks all ARM machines are 5 times worse than Intel machines, even if you have 20 cores or something. Why does this not affect Chromium? **Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64** `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36` 🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​🤦‍♂️​ Welp, guess I'm shipping a user agent override for Firefox on Fedora to pretend to be x86. **EDIT**: The plot thickens. Pretending to be ChromeOS aarch64 *still gets 4K*. Specifically: `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 10452.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36` still works. **EDIT 2**: OK, so the plot *really* thickens now. Chrome is not affected even if it claims to be aarch64. Turns out there is another codepath: apparently YouTube thinks aarch64 Firefox is... a HiSense TV?!?!?!?! Specifically, model 65a67gevs...????? This is *server-side* sniffing now and it's *specifically* looking for Firefox aarch64 (or at least "Gecko and not Chrome/CrOS/something else known to pretend to be Gecko"). And it's the "TV" platform that is triggering the resolution crippling.
  • Fades@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Quite a reductive statement based on a very small obscured window into what Google is doing with user agent profiling but go off I guess since you’re so sure

    • Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      1 year ago

      It’s not. First of all, the code doesn’t check for Firefox at all. Second, it blocks 4K for all Android devices. Conclusions people came up with here just show utter ignorance.

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Google has teams of highly paid expert engineers who’s entire job is to maintain and develop youTube. What do you think is more likely:

        1. Google’s engineers were unable to tell that performance in Firefox is degraded by their changes.
        2. Google sees it as advantageous to disadvantage their competitors - including Firefox. And although they might not be able to do it deliberately, for legal reasons, they can still do it by introducing platform specific changes and strategically neglecting to make it work properly.
        • Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
          01·
          1 year ago

          Have you actually checked the code? It doesn’t target Firefox at all. Man…