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Hector Martin (@[email protected])
social.treehouse.systemsAttached: 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.
The more bullshit like this I read about YouTube the more I despite them. I already use GrayJay on mobile and I’m using ublock Origin + ublock Matrix on Librewolf to control cookie usage on desktop. So far I’ve been able escape the video player block by clearing cache.
I’m just waiting for the day they “force” me onto another frontend.
doesnt ublock origin already block youtube’s anti adblock?
It sort of does for me. I used ublock to block the popup and the overlay that prevents you from using the site. Sometimes a video will stop playing for a moment, but it resumes as soon as I hit play.
im using librewolf too. i keep seeing the adblocker active warning instead of a video, in the video-box on youtube Plays just fine in private window though…