A small set of Firefox users may default to 240p streaming quality on YouTube.
This is the result of an unintentional bug, and it only affects Firefox running on desktop ARM computers.
Changing the Firefox user agent from AArch64 to x86_64 resolves the problem.
After further investigation, Martin amended his statement.
This isn’t an intentional attack on Firefox or Asahi Linux.
It’s just a bizarre bug.
At some point, YouTube implemented a streaming quality limit for the aforementioned Hisense TV.
If anyone at YouTube noticed the problem, they probably didn’t care.
After all, most ARM desktop browsers report themselves as x86_64 for privacy and web compatibility purposes.
Firefox seems to be the only major AArch64 Linux internet tool to stray from this convention.
The idea that YouTube is deliberately punishing Linux ARM users is a stretch of the imagination.
Desktop Linux ARM machines are niche.
Firefox fans don’t have a reason to feel victimized, either.
An Ubuntu Bionic userreproduced this bug in Chromiuma few months ago.
Mozilla and Google haven’t officially commented on this bug.
In any case, Mozilla should probably change the default user agent on its AArch64 Linux desktop surfing app.
Self-identifying as AArch64 may expose users to fingerprinting and additional web compatibility errors.
Websites thatneedto know a system’s CPU architecture are supposed to refer to theUser-Agent Client Hints API, anyway.
