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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.
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:
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.
Supermarkets use extensive marketing to trick you in buying all kinds of stuff. Just like Google (ahem, YouTube) does.
But you want their stuff, so you have to deal with their stuff.
We can discuss further on the subject of tracking that happens when you are a regular and have a membership, or the tracking of digital transactions. Even if you and I don’t necessarily partake in that by buying everything with cash to stay as anonymous as possible.
I could ask you to clarify how you feel “respected” in that environment, but I have honestly little interest in the answer.
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.