Technology

Hell net neutrality laws might even have relevance if they keep this up.

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 get results with DDG

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

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.

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?

Using an alternative front end isn’t losing

Once they get rid of front ends and you go back they’ll have won

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.

doesnt ublock origin already block youtube's anti adblock?

If only there was some kind of legislation that protected an open and fair internet...

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

Having bugs for platforms outside the walled garden is a feature of the walled garden. That's the beauty of it, they don't need to purposefully cripple Firefox and other engines if they just don't take it into account when creating features.

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

Someone on the Hacker News cross-post mentioned it, but it seems like they assumed any ARM Linux device that wasn't detected as running Android was some low-power device like a Raspberry Pi, and didn't anticipate more powerful devices running bog-standard Linux until Apple Silicon and thus Asahi came along.

It's probably the case that this was good intent given the lack of desktop ARM computing hardware, but they really should let the client decide the video quality.

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.

Lina asahi is steamer who reverse engineering apple m1 chip for Linux, so asahi linux was distro for apple m1 at first

Easy: use a user agent switcher that uses blacklists. Mine only spoofs chrome for youtube.com.