Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
social.treehouse.systems
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.
  • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
    231·
    10 个月前

    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.

    • ruckblack@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      251·
      10 个月前

      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.

      • masquenox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30·
        10 个月前

        Duckduckgo has become a little better than it used to be… but google has also become a whole lot worse.

        • Klear@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          10 个月前

          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.

          • masquenox@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            10 个月前

            If you’re looking for research papers, duckduckgo (and yandex) is your friend - google is perfectly unusable for that these days.

      • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        10 个月前

        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.

        • sailingbythelee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          10 个月前

          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.

      • aodhsishaj@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        10 个月前

        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.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        10 个月前

        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 :(

    • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 个月前

      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

      • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        10 个月前

        Works perfectly fine for trouble shooting complicated IT problems.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.chEnglish
      1·
      10 个月前

      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.

    • DontMakeMoreBabies@kbin.social
      1·
      10 个月前

      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.

    • slumberlust@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 个月前

      Isn’t ducksuckgo just paying for google search with a privacy wrapper/obfuscation layer on top?