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YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on ARM systems

Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111567255619206929

Attached: 2 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.

Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)

208 comments

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lhx

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That’s gonna be a lawsuit…

Blackmist

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So Mozilla is going to take Google's money and use that to sue Google?

It's going to be a bug report.

marius851000

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Well... That seems uselessly risky and complex when you can just ask them to not do that. The issue tracker said the Youtube folks have been informed. Let’s just see if they fix that rather quickly. (but they are certainly not the only one with that kind of stuff. I’m not a big fan UA discrimination. I mean, this kind of stuff is what webcompat is all about.) (except for some purpose where you truly care about the architecture, like selecting a download link for an installer) (on the other side, I’m totally fine with feature-flags based discrimination, but that need to be done client-side).

MaxVoltage

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yea like if they want money just grow some balls and ask for a monthly pay for youtube they got our generation like cable had our parents

i would be willing to pay so much much money for REAL premium youtube

i thank the community for all the amazing broadcasts

Drusenija

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Out of curiosity, what would you consider "real" premium YouTube to be? Are you thinking something where the creators get a higher share of the revenue in return for better production values?

Hylactor

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Not OP, but I just want videos. I don't need or want their music service. That's the premium I'm waiting for.

DV8

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That's premium light, they tried and killed it.

nutsack

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sounds like shit

thoughts3rased

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Why though? Because when I have a perfectly competent music streaming service already, why do I essentially want to pay double for a redundant music service I won't use? If I could just get the ad free experience for a cheaper price I'd be satisfied, but they add all the bells and whistles on top that I don't care for and don't want to pay for.

Hylactor

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Does it?

nutsack

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yep 👍

CrowAirbrush

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I wanted to get premium and while i was considering it they had 2 price increases.

No thank you, bye.

I am of the mindset: i want value out of my money, subscriptions that let you own nothing immediately falls out of my requirements so i need it to be a price i'm willing to pay. Which is a low price.

I cancelled spotify the moment they added €1 to the cost, all it gave me was a play button and a bunch of bullshit i don't care for like a year in review. Dude, i was there...listening to that music, i already know what i played so i don't need you to tell me.

But that's just me and i'm the odd one out it seems.

I compare spotify like this; i bought a cd from the discount bin for €5 and got to play that for a whole life and i'd be happy if it was all i had. Spotify opens up do much music to you which is really cool BUT i used to buy a single album a year and copy that to a new cd/mp3 player to add it to the previous boughr cd's. So my cost went from €5/€20 a year to €11 a month while i own nothing. In my head that's automatically a waste of €112 euro's that are spent with no real returning value.

The biggest value most subscription services offer is: they'll stop literally pestering you with ads.