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.
  • ruckblack@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    251·
    10 months ago

    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 months ago

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

      • pohart@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        an

        This is the truth. I switched back when I got a new pc at work, and google was way worse.

      • Klear@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        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 months ago

          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 months ago

      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 months ago

        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 months ago

      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 months ago

      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 :(