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. **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.
  • YouAreLiterallyAnNPC@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    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:

    • Tight regulations.
    • Respecting its consumers.
    • Robust competition that isn’t prone to monopolistic enterprise.

    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.

      • YouAreLiterallyAnNPC@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I feel respected because I grab the product I want, take it to the register, and pay for it and get the result that I expect based on what I paid. Marketing and manipulation aside, I acknowledge that’s part of being an educated consumer. I’d thank you for putting value in my response, but I’m not interested either.