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YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on ARM systems (social.treehouse.systems)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 67 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] 53 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There are qualities that are useful for having different responses, like supported language, whether the browser accepts gzipped content, etc.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Fuck that shit.

    • You can do language codes in the URL to serve different versions of content
    • If your browser can do TLS then it should be able to handle gzip content or alternatively if the internet didn't allow cookies and scripting in your browser then it would have been safe to use TLSs built in compression

    Check out the Gemini protocol if you want to see that a lot of HTTP spec stuff is completely unnecessary

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    So if I type in "google.com" what language should the front page be in?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Who said anything about English?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

    My main point with that bit was that a lot of content exists on the internet without any translated versions and the world hasn't ended because of this, look at non English Lemmy instances.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The issue is that some of those techniques are only useful after the client has rendered the content rather than before.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    But they are useful and completely valid ways of dealing with the problem.

    It is not the end of the world if I have to click am extra once or twice to change the language. Hell most websites have much harder processes just to reject cookies.

    Personally I would rather err on the side of slightly extra work the odd time I'm not on a website not in my native language than have an extra bit of information that can be used to track me.

    Again take a look at the Gemini protocol, its a perfectly fine browsing experience without all the cruft.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    Valid, but not standard and more inconvenient.

    Additionally, you act like query strings can't be used to track you when they certainly can.

    Most of the advantages of Gemini are implemented in the client and not the protocol itself.

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