Lee DunaYouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems — misreporting as an x86 CPU appears to be a widespread browser fix
originaluciferthis prolly wasnt a bad decision early on... why pushing something to a population who cant utilize it... but shit changes fast, google.
FlakyThe weirder thing is Firefox on ARM being detected as a HiSense TV. I did a cursory search to see if HiSense ever used Firefox OS on the TV and it doesn’t seem like it. Panasonic seemed to be the only manufacturer using it.
Hector Martin (@[email protected])
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.
ericswparkCould be that the developers for the HiSense TV just copy-pasted whatever UA into their browser and called it a day.
It seems somewhat damning that Google’s own browser had a workaround for this, though
was it ignorance or malicious intent?
if it was a person, i would try and assume ignorance.. im not sure google the company deserves such respect
Or it’s a company so fuckoff huge that one department (Chrome on Android) couldn’t get a bug report escalated in another department (YouTube). Eventually they just put in a UA workaround while the bug rots in a backlog somewhere. Common enterprise bullshit.
Or the Chrome on Android team didn’t even bother reporting the issue to YouTube and just threw in a cheap workaround. Also common enterprise bullshit.
Bingo. When I was a Chrome developer working on video stuff, we mostly treated YouTube like a separate company. Getting our stuff to work with theirs was a priority, but no more than, say, Netflix.