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Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
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.
Some widely spoken language I imagine, Chinese, Spanish, English I don’t care. Since .com is intended for commercial use, the language of the companies biggest market makes sense here as well.
You’re also forgetting that the likes of google.ru, google.nl and google.every_other_country_code exist.
Also there are plently of websites the have language selection in the site that overrides that header, look at Wikipedia.
There are plently of sites in non english languages that cater to non English speakers only, not every site has or needs 10 different translations.
At this point we also have translation engines in the browser so for pages in languages you don’t know, that you absolutely need to access, you can use it to understand the page to a decent level and/or be able to navigate to a version in your language if available.
Who said anything about English?
I just used it as an example since it’s pretty much the lingua franca of the internet and it’s what we are currently using. The same argument applies to any other language.