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Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systemsAttached: 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.
Good counter-point, except that your local supermarket has to respect three separate market pressures that Google (edit: to be clear, I mean YouTube) clearly has no regard for:
So no, I don’t feel that we should ‘fuck them, too I guess’ because when I go to the supermarket I feel like I’m the customer, not the product. I feel that I get what I’m paying for and that my time is respected. Nothing about YouTube leaves me feeling like that. There’s no sense that I’m a respected customer and therein no sense that there’s any value in trying to respect a clearly one-sided relationship.