YouTube is crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux - eviltoast
Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systems
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.
  • F04118F@feddit.nlEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    As the Hacker News comments say, this seems like a sensible default: when faced with an ARM processor running Linux but not Android, it’s probably a Raspberry Pi. That there’s a few users running Linux on Apple Silicon is more likely something they did not think of or too small a group to care about rather than intently degrading their experience.

    (I only skimmed so please correct me where I’m wrong, just didn’t want to leave this headline on Lemmy with no comments)

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      You seem to be right there, but Hector did update the post after finding out that Firefox on ARM was being detected as a specific HiSense TV on the server side even with the UA being faked.