1y ago

YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on ARM systems

social.treehouse.systems /@marcan/111567255619206929

Hacker News @derp.foo

haxor @derp.foo

BOT

1y ago

YouTube is crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux

social.treehouse.systems /@marcan/111567255619206929

12 2

177 comments

Fuck Google.
Searching a tracking number from Chrome using Google? Finds a package.
Same search on Google from Firefox leads to nothing.
- Hell net neutrality laws might even have relevance if they keep this up.
  
  Edit 2: Well, at least I know I'm right. Downvote away.
  Sorry, I'm all for net neutrality, but behavior based on browser usage, while dickish, has nothing to do with it.
  Edit: it seems like I'm being schooled. Got any sources to back up your downvotes?
  Edit 3: nope. I'm not being schooled. The downvoters should either get better informed or stop downvoting with their emotions.
- It also does that with other unrecognised user agents.
  Personally I don't understand why someone would still use Google when duckduckgo has more features and is just as good for searching and in the very rare case it isn't you can easily switch back temporarily by just adding the prefix "!g" to your query.
  
  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.
  
  I really want to ditch Google, but DuckDuckGo aint there my brother.
  It may work for some simpler/lazy searches, but for real stuff, nah.
  The "good" thing is that Google search is going the way of Amazon, so with Google shooting themselves in the foot and DDG catching up a bit, maybe soon they'll level
  
  ddg always drops one of at least two troublesome terms. Which is infuriating.
  Might have to do with my settings, in which case it is a bug.
  Bangs are gold (which is why ddg is my default) but i still sometimes miss exclusions.
  
  Isn't ducksuckgo just paying for google search with a privacy wrapper/obfuscation layer on top?
- I get results with DDG
- It's stupid we need an extension to fix this on mobile devices but there's an extension to fix this on mobile devices

Someone, light the EU signal!
Lawsuit intensifies in the distance

Fuck Google. Ruining the internet for profit.
- They dont want to just run it.
  they want to control and dictate it.
  Google needs a massive regulatory hammer to come down on it and smash it into dozens, if not hundreds, of tiny individual companies
  
  That needs to happen more with Alphabet than Google but either would be great.
  
  nationalize these fucks

Can you say Anticompetition practices?
1 lawsuit, 2 lawsuit, 3 lawsuit ah ah ah
- Slam dunks, yes. But does any of the people who would bring a case against then have enough money to fight an army of more lawyers? Probably not.
  
  Idk I’ll just find some millionaire/billionaire who’s hungry for public approval in the space and bug them about it probably

User Agent String: A browser's way of lying about what it is, in order to not trigger some server's arcane content filtering system.
- User Agents should be optional. The whole idea of the Internet was that the server should respond the same way to the same request regardless of the client's qualities.
  
  There are qualities that are useful for having different responses, like supported language, whether the browser accepts gzipped content, etc.
  
  Bot

YouTube thinks aarch64 Firefox is... a HiSense TV?!?!?!?!
Ah yes, televisions are exactly where the user wants lower resolution

deleted
- The thing is, I really don't think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that's because of iOS.
  I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.
  Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.
  
  Google has a history of this sort of "whoops, we got caught, uhhh... That was just a bug!" behavior.

The more bullshit like this I read about YouTube the more I despite them. I already use GrayJay on mobile and I'm using ublock Origin + ublock Matrix on Librewolf to control cookie usage on desktop. So far I've been able escape the video player block by clearing cache.
I'm just waiting for the day they "force" me onto another frontend.
- doesnt ublock origin already block youtube's anti adblock?
  
  Nope, I still got it after a while
  
  It sort of does for me. I used ublock to block the popup and the overlay that prevents you from using the site. Sometimes a video will stop playing for a moment, but it resumes as soon as I hit play.
- im using librewolf too. i keep seeing the adblocker active warning instead of a video, in the video-box on youtube Plays just fine in private window though..
  
  Even after clearing the cache from the ublock filter settings?

They finally made YouTube unusable for me even with ublock. Refreshing the filters didn't work and told me I could only watch 3 videos.
Google was always going to win the war but I didn't expect it to be like this.
I'm now using piped for all YouTube videos.
- I randomly stopped getting the anti-adblocking. On my gaming PC I never got them, on my laptop they went away after I disabled my adblocking for one video and then re-enabled it. Now I don't get them at all. Did they give up on me?
  
  I'd love they gave up on me too...
- Using an alternative front end isn’t losing
  Once they get rid of front ends and you go back they’ll have won
- You are remembering to purge all caches before refreshing I hope?
- What works for me is opening a new Private windows on Firefox, with ublock installed, and then login into YouTube. I do have to login every time I hope a private windows by so far I’ve been able to watch unlimited videos with an ad blocker installed
- I wish Piped worked for me, I was trying to watch a Linux tutorial in full HD to see the commands better and Piped just refused to buffer the video.
  
  There are other alternatives too, like invidious. The yewtu.be instance works decently well for me but limits to 720p I think. There is a list of all running instances somewhere on the github iirc. There's other instances that allow full HD, just have a search and you should be able to find one.
- Try opening your subscription page as usual with your ublock, but then right-click "open in private window" the videos you want to watch. Works for me.
- Why are you using YouTube at all if you don't like it so much? Go use something else.

From what I can understand from the thread, they aren't deliberatly crippling FF.
- Oh, they also do that. Just not based on architecture. https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970721/google-youtube-ad-blocker-five-second-delay-firefox-chrome
  
  The way I read it is Chrome gets a pass on the architecture crippling, the others don't.
  Someone correct me if I got the wrong idea.
  
  It looks like also this was against adblocker so, again, not specifically Firefox. Quote from the article itself:
  The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said they’re seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge, too. Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use. Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.
  
  Which turned out to also have nothing to do with FF but is targeting adblockers.

That’s gonna be a lawsuit…
- So Mozilla is going to take Google's money and use that to sue Google?
  It's going to be a bug report.
- Well... That seems uselessly risky and complex when you can just ask them to not do that. The issue tracker said the Youtube folks have been informed. Let’s just see if they fix that rather quickly. (but they are certainly not the only one with that kind of stuff. I’m not a big fan UA discrimination. I mean, this kind of stuff is what webcompat is all about.) (except for some purpose where you truly care about the architecture, like selecting a download link for an installer) (on the other side, I’m totally fine with feature-flags based discrimination, but that need to be done client-side).
- yea like if they want money just grow some balls and ask for a monthly pay for youtube they got our generation like cable had our parents
  i would be willing to pay so much much money for REAL premium youtube
  i thank the community for all the amazing broadcasts
  
  Out of curiosity, what would you consider "real" premium YouTube to be? Are you thinking something where the creators get a higher share of the revenue in return for better production values?
  
  I wanted to get premium and while i was considering it they had 2 price increases.
  No thank you, bye.
  I am of the mindset: i want value out of my money, subscriptions that let you own nothing immediately falls out of my requirements so i need it to be a price i'm willing to pay. Which is a low price.
  I cancelled spotify the moment they added €1 to the cost, all it gave me was a play button and a bunch of bullshit i don't care for like a year in review. Dude, i was there...listening to that music, i already know what i played so i don't need you to tell me.
  But that's just me and i'm the odd one out it seems.
  I compare spotify like this; i bought a cd from the discount bin for €5 and got to play that for a whole life and i'd be happy if it was all i had. Spotify opens up do much music to you which is really cool BUT i used to buy a single album a year and copy that to a new cd/mp3 player to add it to the previous boughr cd's. So my cost went from €5/€20 a year to €11 a month while i own nothing. In my head that's automatically a waste of €112 euro's that are spent with no real returning value.
  The biggest value most subscription services offer is: they'll stop literally pestering you with ads.

Switched to Freetube/Invidious. Like the sun, I'm never looking directly at Youtube.com ever again.

Hmm, anti competitive practices.
- If only there was some kind of legislation that protected an open and fair internet...
- No
  
  Yes.

Joke is on them, i only ever use NewPipe (or freetube on desktop)
- I've been trying to get ReVanced working on WSA and it force closes at start.
  Going to give newpipe a try, thanks!
  
  Have you tried installing the MicroG package?
- Discovering freetube was the best thing of my video browsing life. It works so well it's incredible Feels good to not be continuously tracked while watching videos.

It might just be a coincidence but I've had a lot of trouble using Invidious or Piped lately too. Videos load and titles load, but video thumbnails don't load for me.
- Yeah, Google started blocking popular instances of Invidious and Piped in May this year: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822
  Every so often, it may start working again when those instances get a different IP address, but it usually doesn't last more than a few days...

I think they want everyone to use user agent switcher so that Firefox share will drop and then nobody will support it and will die.
- Easy: use a user agent switcher that uses blacklists. Mine only spoofs chrome for youtube.com.
  
  Thanks, will definitely check out this unnamed extension.
  
  Yeah I used a user agent switcher that didn't seem to have a blacklist feature that I could find and it broke every cloudfare site.

Disgusting!

Asahi Linux?
They named a distro after a beer brand?
- Asahi means “rising sun” in Japanese, and it is also the name of an apple cultivar. 旭りんご (asahi ringo) is what we know as the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name.
  
  ... They named Macs after a beer brand?
  
  That was fascinating. Thank you for sharing 💖
- Lina asahi is steamer who reverse engineering apple m1 chip for Linux, so asahi linux was distro for apple m1 at first
- https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-meaning-of/japanese-word-5f42a167fdb1f9d44bbfc0679bf5fe5b7292a479.html

Here we go again...

Stupid question, what about 2 in 1 tablets?
- Asking logical questions in a thread about a conspiracy theory? We don't do that here.
- its all flabergasted bro its their servers their rules

And that's why I use mpv and yt-dlp, folks.

I like how nobody actually bothered to read the thread and doesn't understand this is a bug and wasn't done on purpose.
- Quite a reductive statement based on a very small obscured window into what Google is doing with user agent profiling but go off I guess since you’re so sure
  
  It's not. First of all, the code doesn't check for Firefox at all. Second, it blocks 4K for all Android devices. Conclusions people came up with here just show utter ignorance.

Rumble ftw!

177 comments