YouTube is crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux?

So they are serving lower resolutions to ARM devices with no GPU acceleration. Doesn&#x27;t sound like deliberately crippling Asahi Macs to me.. more like a reasonable default assuming those devices are something like a raspberry pi. I&#x27;m assuming it is just a default and you can select whatever resolution you like.<p>Detecting if the device has 20 cores or whatever like he says if possible would be more invasive of privacy. They would be criticized for that too. There&#x27;s just no winning lol

It looks like it&#x27;s not specific to Asahi or Firefox - YouTube is limiting resolution on any ARM system, but Chrome on ARM lies and claims to be x86.<p>To be fair, there are a lot of ARM Chromebooks and SBCs that can&#x27;t really handle 4K video.

Another Firefox Linux web trouble I&#x27;ve had: Twitch refuses to login, claiming I need to use a supported browser. Then they link to a page saying Firefox is supported. Have this happening on two different computers<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bbs.archlinux.org&#x2F;viewtopic.php?id=289645" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bbs.archlinux.org&#x2F;viewtopic.php?id=289645</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Twitch&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1118xgz&#x2F;unsupported_browser_bug_on_linux" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Twitch&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1118xgz&#x2F;unsupported...</a><p>Someone solved it by disabling fingerprinting resistance <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;archlinux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;100t2q3&#x2F;comment&#x2F;j2mr68x" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;archlinux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;100t2q3&#x2F;comment&#x2F;...</a>

It doesn’t specifically target Asahi Linux and&#x2F;or Firefox but reduces resolution on ARM devices. That behavior and assumptions made through a user agent string may be debated but that’s another topic.

I doubt YouTube cares enough for &quot;Asahi Linux&quot; to try and cripple Firefox on it.<p>It&#x27;s more like that guy plays the victim card to build some PR.

Interesting that in Mac with Apple chips (M1 Pro) it seems both Chrome and Firefox report them as Intel:<p><pre><code> Mozilla&#x2F;5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko&#x2F;20100101 Firefox&#x2F;120.0 Mozilla&#x2F;5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit&#x2F;537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome&#x2F;120.0.0.0 Safari&#x2F;537.36 </code></pre> Edit: even Safari itself:<p><pre><code> Mozilla&#x2F;5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit&#x2F;605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version&#x2F;17.1.2 Safari&#x2F;605.1.15</code></pre>

Oops...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;3389882&#x2F;former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;3389882&#x2F;former-mozilla...</a>

To all the people saying this makes sense, why do they specifically lie for Chromium:<p>&gt; Why does this not affect Chromium? Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64

Didn&#x27;t Google want to kill user agent based checks and remove it from chrome completely?

For me writing comment replies on YT is completely broken. Since about a week the text input field just doesn&#x27;t appear. Everything else is there but no place for actually writing something.<p>It&#x27;s in Firefox but it happens with Chrome user agent too and it just stopped working without an update inbetween.

&gt; 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.<p>Can&#x27;t he just change the default? It&#x27;s not locked in to a maximum resolution of 240 is it, he could click the video settings and switch up the quality to 1080 or similar.<p>Seems a bit excessive for him to refer to this as &quot;crippling Firefox&quot; when it only takes a couple of clicks to sort it out.

Fun fact: If you go to `about:compat` in Firefox, you can see many of these kinds of fixes, that get automatically applied for you.<p>e.g. for steamcommunity.com <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1570108" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1570108</a><p>&gt; Add the following UA override for desktop Mozilla&#x2F;5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_5) AppleWebKit&#x2F;537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome&#x2F;75.0.3770.142 Safari&#x2F;537.36

I remember youtube being shady with firefox for ages. I think there was some kind of famous div being injected into firefox responses that caused some issues. Fuck google.

YouTube is crippling Firefox everywhere.<p>I don&#x27;t even bother trying to watch YouTube on Firefox, my main browser on Windows. I switch to Chrome for this task.

Get a plugin for browser User-agent string OS signature manipulation.<p>It greatly simplifies the bugs in a sea of badly written JavaScript on the web.<p>Best of luck =)

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a lazy development team.

I don&#x27;t feel like there is a good reason to expose this to websites by default. Just turn on resistFingerprinting and be done with most of this crap.

Asahi Linux might work for me if you could patch the drivers to lower the frequency of high pitched noises an octave or two.

From one of the responses:<p>&gt; Why are web services like this? Just let the client or user decide, dammit!<p>1) because YT is paying real $$ to show me videos of cats (especially when I have a bunch of ad-blockers and haven&#x27;t see a YT ad in 15 years) 2) because &quot;it&#x27;s your phone dude, you don&#x27;t need to watch a cat-video in 4k!! your friggin&#x27; screen doesn&#x27;t have 4k to begin with 3) because we can<p>(the last one.. it&#x27;s the last one)

user-agent should just be dropped altogether.<p>For the same reason all browser&#x27;s user agents are prefixed Mozilla&#x2F;5.0, all browsers end up all lying anyway.<p>Let&#x27;s all machines be an iphone or windows NT&#x2F;10 device and forget about this shit.

I’m far from a Google fanboy. I haven’t owned an Android phone in a decade and I’m holding off switching back to Chrome until the last sensible moment. But Christ, every “YouTube is crippling browser &#x2F; OS foo” that I’ve ever seen is complete BS. It’s usually someone with an esoteric configuration and a victim complex. This is no exception.

I&#x27;m really surprised they use heuristics like this to decide the best video to show.<p>If I were them, I would make a neural network to predict which video quality a user is least likely to switch away from. Then default to that.<p>Inputs to the network should be country, detected network speed, CPU speed, browser, screen resolution, etc. also include the users history of changing resolutions - a user who frequently decreases the resolution is probably conscious of bandwidth and therefore doesn&#x27;t want to default to HD even if their device is capable.<p>The network can probably be tiny (perhaps just a few thousand weights), so could run on either the client or the server.