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.
  • Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    From what I can understand from the thread, they aren’t deliberatly crippling FF.

      • Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        It looks like also this was against adblocker so, again, not specifically Firefox. Quote from the article itself:

        The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said they’re seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge, too. Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use. Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.

        • Ace! _SL/S@ani.socialEnglish
          12·
          11 months ago

          Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use

          That means nothing, this check could be done on the server side and noone would know

          • Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            I mean… We can we can invent a thousand conspiracies if we want to…

          • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            Except that the delay and ad blocker check is literally in the JavaScript code, you can see it.

            • Ace! _SL/S@ani.socialEnglish
              0·
              11 months ago

              Indeed, but google can just transmit different javascript to different users/browsers/regions etc (that’s why browsers have useragents, so websites can improve browser compatibility according to the circumstances). It can be decided on a whim and noone would know except some coders at google

              • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                11 months ago

                Except everyone would know. Multiple people across the globe testing different browsers have looked at the same JavaScript code that is being sent to the browser. The check is there, client-side, google isn’t sending a different JavaScript payload for different browsers. Like you said, they could, but that’s not how it currently functions

      • Kalash@feddit.chEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Which turned out to also have nothing to do with FF but is targeting adblockers.