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Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
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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.
Fuck Google.
Searching a tracking number from Chrome using Google? Finds a package.
Same search on Google from Firefox leads to nothing.
Hell net neutrality laws might even have relevance if they keep this up.
Edit 2: Well, at least I know I’m right. Downvote away.
Sorry, I’m all for net neutrality, but behavior based on browser usage, while dickish, has nothing to do with it.
Edit: it seems like I’m being schooled. Got any sources to back up your downvotes?
Edit 3: nope. I’m not being schooled. The downvoters should either get better informed or stop downvoting with their emotions.
Hmmm, not sure why people are downvoting…
Maybe these days people are using the term “net neutrality” in a broader sense to just mean equitable access, rather than the specific meaning that’s been used in the past to refer to ISP behavior and giving preference based on how much is paid?
Well, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality to see whether or not you are being schooled on it.
In that case I’m right. Thanks. I thought my memory was pulling a fast one on me.
yes it does, net neutrality not only has to do with the ISP but also the services. different useragent string should NOT lead to a worse quality of service.
Right, but your service provider has nothing to do with that difference. The fact that the entity you’re contacting on the other end of the connection is providing a degraded experience isn’t an internet service delivery problem.
Your internet service, which is what net neutrality is concerned with, is distinct from services on the internet. In the same way that your phone service has nothing to do with the quality of service you get from HP’s telephone support line.
The web is based on open standards; that’s what made it universally accessible. How does limiting access based on how you access the web benefit anyone?
Nobody is defending the practice, they’re just differentiating it from what we’ve previously referred to as “net neutrality,” which is 100% entirely about how ISPs process internet traffic, and not about the services being used within that traffic.
Unless I missed the memo, and “net neutrality” means something different now.
It doesn’t, but that isn’t their point. They’re simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.
It also does that with other unrecognised user agents.
Personally I don’t understand why someone would still use Google when duckduckgo has more features and is just as good for searching and in the very rare case it isn’t you can easily switch back temporarily by just adding the prefix “!g” to your query.
I tried duckduckgo for a while and kept coming back to Google for “real” searches at work. It’s not as good for searching in my experience. Yet.
Duckduckgo has become a little better than it used to be… but google has also become a whole lot worse.
an
This is the truth. I switched back when I got a new pc at work, and google was way worse.
Yeah, I haven’t quite found a replacement that is better than google, but the way the trajectories are, it’s only a matter of time.
If you’re looking for research papers, duckduckgo (and yandex) is your friend - google is perfectly unusable for that these days.
The vast majority of times I go back to Google to do a search I find it also returns useless results. I’m not convinced it’s any better than duckduckgo. I think it used to be, but not anymore.
I had the same experience. I used switch between DDG and Google when DDG gave results I didn’t want. During the pandemic, I remember DDG giving lots of false positives and odd, non-standard web page hits. Like, if I was searching for current COVID advice, it would give me hits from the health department in Bumfuck, Nebraska instead of, say, CDC (and I don’t live in Bumfuck, Nebraska). It has really improved since then and now I can use DDG pretty much exclusively. Not having to scroll past a page of Google ads to find my search results is quite glorious.
The 6 residents of bumfuck Nebraska would like a word with you after their Trump circlejerk.
And I would be honored to speak with them!
I think it depends on wether google is eating the cookies or not
What’s your field?
I’m in a DevOps/Cloud Engineer role and DDG works better for me than Google. No ads and somehow fewer of the gpt generated fake help articles.
Same vein, devops/data engineering. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, I’d like to get off Google.
Big same. I’ll even bang out to Startpage to try to avoid directly using Google (!sp vs. !g), but that’s not as good either.
I bow to my search overlord Google. Until I try Grasp, Kagi, and SearXNG, and hopefully one of those will satisfy (in particular SearXNG).
Until then DDG remains my default, and I’ll !g half the time :(
I really want to ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo aint there my brother.
It may work for some simpler/lazy searches, but for real stuff, nah.
The “good” thing is that Google search is going the way of Amazon, so with Google shooting themselves in the foot and DDG catching up a bit, maybe soon they’ll level
Works perfectly fine for trouble shooting complicated IT problems.
ddg always drops one of at least two troublesome terms. Which is infuriating.
Might have to do with my settings, in which case it is a bug.
Bangs are gold (which is why ddg is my default) but i still sometimes miss exclusions.
I’ve switched most defualts over to DDG but Google is still better for some things. Feels sort of like the late 99s/early 00s with Altavista, Ask Jeeves, etc.
Isn’t ducksuckgo just paying for google search with a privacy wrapper/obfuscation layer on top?
Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google
I think they also use Yahoo and their own scrapers too.
Not that it matters of course.
I get results with DDG
It’s stupid we need an extension to fix this on mobile devices but there’s an extension to fix this on mobile devices