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YouTube is crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux?
- Shawnecy 3y agoTo all the people saying this makes sense, why do they specifically lie for Chromium: > Why does this not affect Chromium? Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64
- saalweachter 3y agoLooking at other comment threads, that seems to be part of "User Agent Reduction": https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/user-agent https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/us...
- agilob 3y agoDidn't Google want to kill user agent based checks and remove it from chrome completely?
- papichulo2023 3y agoI think they wanted to replace it for a capabilities check but I dont think there is an alternative just yet.
- jug 3y agoIt doesn’t specifically target Asahi Linux and/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.
- mrweasel 3y agoExactly, the post even mentions that Chromium pretends to be AMD64 to get around the limitation. In most cases this detection is "good enough", but with Asahi a new edge case has emerged. Ideally the device would be able to tell the server about it's capabilities, but that could be seen as an invasion of privacy and could quickly turn into a new metric for profiling internet users across sites.
- nicce 3y ago> Ideally the device would be able to tell the server about it's capabilities It is not technically privacy issue if it "tells" about them, by having freedom to tell what it wants. If the information is mandated with remote attestation and server can force it and otherwise not work properly, then it becomes privacy issue.
- zaptheimpaler 3y agoSo they are serving lower resolutions to ARM devices with no GPU acceleration. Doesn't sound like deliberately crippling Asahi Macs to me.. more like a reasonable default assuming those devices are something like a raspberry pi. I'm assuming it is just a default and you can select whatever resolution you like. 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's just no winning lol
- watermelon0 3y agoHave to agree with this. Not saying the check should be there, but the majority of non-mobile/server ARM devices are generally underpowered, especially with per-core performance.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThat sounds reasonable but it's weird that Chrome lies by pretending to be x86_64. The same performance concerns that apply to Firefox should apply to it.
- borissk 3y agoHmmm, serving low resolution videos to ARM devices running Linux also makes harder for a competitor to build an alternative to Android.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- James-Livesey 3y agoTrue, but any competing operating system could just falsely report that it is running x86-64 and therefore trick YouTube into serving high-res content. Disclosure: currently (as a personal project) slowly building an alternative to Android
- DeathArrow 3y agoCan you share it?
- zlg_codes 3y ago[flagged]
- slacka 3y agoDid you even read the post before you commented? From the post: > I believe this only triggers on software decoding, which is why it particularly affects us (and not, say, macOS which has hardware decoding). It's completely sensible for YT to assume an ARM device without acceleration needs lower quality video.
- zlg_codes 3y agoThe heuristics used were not sufficient to properly determine the capabilities of the hardware it was running on. Makers can fix this problem by giving users choices. People like you need to learn that saying things you disagree with does not mean we're stupid or didn't read something. Maybe try understanding someone instead of being a dick. I doubt you have much to contribute to a tech conversation anyway.
- alwayslikethis 3y agoI don'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.
- nfriedly 3y agoIt looks like it'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. To be fair, there are a lot of ARM Chromebooks and SBCs that can't really handle 4K video.
- jug 3y agoYeah this is likely done as a shortcut with assumptions made about ARM, but also an example of those that might come back and bite you. ARM is absolutely a moving performance target!
- kebman 3y agoHow many of these devices cater to large screens? IMHO most of such devices cater to small screens, and then 4K is already overkill. Even 720p is overkill on many of the smaller devices.
- mark-r 3y agoTake a quick look at your phone.
- rjsw 3y agoThe Pinebook and Pinebook Pro have 1080 screens and can have hardware video decoding support. I wrote 'can' because the drivers are still in staging for the mainline Linux kernel.
- jeroenhd 3y agoOn my 1080p phone I set the resolution to 4k because 4k + downscaling makes for much better video quality than the butchered blur of pixels that Youtube's 1080p encoder produces. I would've preferred a higher bitrate 1080p stream, but Youtube only offers that on a limited amount of videos (assuming you have Premium of course).
- nicce 3y agoAuthor might have forget that the Asahi is not the "de-facto" Linux in ARM world. Not everything is about them. Raspberry Pi et. al. has been there many many years.
- HenryBemis 3y agoFrom one of the responses: > Why are web services like this? Just let the client or user decide, dammit! 1) because YT is paying real $$ to show me videos of cats (especially when I have a bunch of ad-blockers and haven't see a YT ad in 15 years) 2) because "it's your phone dude, you don't need to watch a cat-video in 4k!! your friggin' screen doesn't have 4k to begin with 3) because we can (the last one.. it's the last one)
- PaulHoule 3y agoAsahi Linux might work for me if you could patch the drivers to lower the frequency of high pitched noises an octave or two.
- shaicoleman 3y agoOops... https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoI’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 / 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.
- Joel_Mckay 3y agoGet a plugin for browser User-agent string OS signature manipulation. It greatly simplifies the bugs in a sea of badly written JavaScript on the web. Best of luck =)
- londons_explore 3y agoI'm really surprised they use heuristics like this to decide the best video to show. 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. 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't want to default to HD even if their device is capable. The network can probably be tiny (perhaps just a few thousand weights), so could run on either the client or the server.
- michaelt 3y agoTBH I would have thought the best default would be 'what resolution did they choose last time, and get adequate performance?' and you'd only resort to guessing for users with no cookies.
- londons_explore 3y agoAnd that is presumably what the network would predict in most cases.
- SushiHippie 3y agoFun fact: If you go to `about:compat` in Firefox, you can see many of these kinds of fixes, that get automatically applied for you. e.g. for steamcommunity.com https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1570108 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1570108 > Add the following UA override for desktop Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.142 Safari/537.36
- __s 3y agoAnother Firefox Linux web trouble I'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 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=289645 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=289645 https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/1118xgz/unsupported_browser_bug_on_linux https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/1118xgz/unsupported... Someone solved it by disabling fingerprinting resistance https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/100t2q3/comment/j2mr68x https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/100t2q3/comment/...
- alpaca128 3y agoThe last time I used Twitch it also insisted that my 16 character password was too long for their 40 character limit, so that kind of thing seems to be normal there.
- nicce 3y ago> Someone solved it by disabling fingerprinting resistance Similar issue happens also in some Google services, e.g. Google Docs. It does not work at all (or everything is in wrong resolution) if you have fingerprint resistance enabled.
- mikrotikker 3y agoAnd slack I believe
- hnlmorg 3y agoI can’t say I’ve had an issue with Twitch on either macOS nor Arch Linux - both Firefox, no extensions aside containers. YouTube, however, did stop working on me this morning. It’s now demanding I sign in, which it didn’t before.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThe issue on Twitch only pops up when you enable the `resistFingerprinting` flag. If Twitch can't fingerprint you, they simply refuse your attempt to log in.
- alpaca128 3y agoFor me writing comment replies on YT is completely broken. Since about a week the text input field just doesn't appear. Everything else is there but no place for actually writing something. It's in Firefox but it happens with Chrome user agent too and it just stopped working without an update inbetween.
- vivvle 3y ago> 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. Can't he just change the default? It'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. Seems a bit excessive for him to refer to this as "crippling Firefox" when it only takes a couple of clicks to sort it out.
- CP3f6kMA 3y agoFor me, on Asahi, the 1080p is locked behind premium.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI doubt YouTube cares enough for "Asahi Linux" to try and cripple Firefox on it. It's more like that guy plays the victim card to build some PR.
- prmoustache 3y agouser-agent should just be dropped altogether. For the same reason all browser's user agents are prefixed Mozilla/5.0, all browsers end up all lying anyway. Let's all machines be an iphone or windows NT/10 device and forget about this shit.
- m45t3r 3y agoInteresting that in Mac with Apple chips (M1 Pro) it seems both Chrome and Firefox report them as Intel: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edit: even Safari itself: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
- dist-epoch 3y agoYouTube is crippling Firefox everywhere. I don't even bother trying to watch YouTube on Firefox, my main browser on Windows. I switch to Chrome for this task.
- ykonstant 3y agoApart from live-streaming where you want to see/interact with the chat, why not mpv?
- dist-epoch 3y agoBecause starting external programs and copy pasting links is annoying, especially if I have multiple video tabs opened.
- WesSouza 3y agoNever attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a lazy development team.
- djbusby 3y agoWhy blame devs? What about a team with management who values shipping over quality?. Gotta hit my KPIs. Of course it's fine to ship the new site without RSS we'll find a solution "later", we just gotta hit the deadline.
- ddalex 3y agoFrom a business perspective, how would you write this? How many developer hours are worth serving better default resolution for 0.01% of devices?
- hknmtt 3y agoI 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.
- tinus_hn 3y agoIt’s like the sleazy old Microsoft tricks where every update to Frontpage introduced a little new construct that would ‘happen to’ cause Netscape to crash. Just typical monopolist behavior.