The Dumbest Firefox Bug Ever Discovered
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- čas přidán 22. 12. 2023
- Firefox is an incredible browser, but like any browser it has to contend with terribly designed websites which do things in ways that don't seem to make any logical sense such as with CZcams slowing the site down on ARM64 based platforms for no reason.
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The user agent string is just all browsers pretending to be each other.
wasn't the whole point of websites is that they didn't have to target a specific platform?
@@freedustin Yes, but then we let web developers touch it and everything went wrong.
More accurately, it's all browsers pretending they're Netscape.
@@CptJistuce replace web devs with corporations and you are correct.
the devs have no control over what companies hire for.
@@freedustin Nah, I remember personal websites targetting specific browsers, back when people had personal websites.
A related issue: Some websites autodetect your language. Sometimes they are so horrendously bugged that it's impossible to use the correct language. I'm bilingual but prefer English because it makes text ca. 30% shorter than my native language. My browser is setup accordingly. However these bugged websites seem to ignore the browser preferences and the language manually selected through their interface and instead guess the language on IP or something! It takes a special kind of developer to brake a system THAT badly!
I absolutely resent pages like Etsy that starts machine translating everything if it only finds out a hint through your approx location via IP that you are not in a majority English speaking country.
While English is my second language, I tend to use devices and software set to English as the language.
CZcams, while not relying on machine translation (yet) keeps changing back to my country’s language after a while and Etsy machine translates everything to the point of making everything feel like an AI generated bootleg.
I had the same issues in my Chrome days. Luckily, neither Brave or Vivaldi have given me those issues.
YES! I'm not alone!
The Accept-Language header, it's ignored by all but a few websites. Even though mine says NL-BE;NL;EN, i often get presented a French version of the website.
No matter how many times i change the URL from /fr or .fr to /nl or .nl/.be, a bad ip-geo database is apparently trusted more than what i have configured my browser to say.
@@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 It's not a problem with the browser, it's a problem with the websites. I'm English but live in Portugal, but also use satellite internet which means my ip address is not always associated with Portugal. Even though I have my language set as English, I still get some websites auto selecting Portuguese, and sometimes Greek, Italian or some other random language because they are using some crazy broken ip lookup system. (And I'm using Brave.)
CZcams is also an offender. Because each time I sign in on a new browser profile, I have change language. Why my language preference is not saved to my profile is beyond me and I hate it.
Best typo every discovered in a Brodie Robertson video title
The Dumbest Brodie Typo Every
Who's Every tho?
Probably the guy that discovered the Firefox bug.
Especially combined with that outro - probably named the video right after lol
His auto correct must having stopped working
It would not surprise me if the tv in question also reported media Capabilities incorrectly. CZcams worked around the device issue causing other issues.
If they have to serve a TV videos in 240p they should just make it say "Hey your TV is shit, if you can still return it, you should go do that."
@@t1m3f0xblast your inbox with "tech savvy's" 101 😂
Honestly tho CZcams didn't need to do that lol who cares if that one tv from Hisense misreported its capability and got shat on. CZcams gave me 4K option on my AMD A9 laptop with 768p screen and 4GB RAM it's so dumb to think that they went through the entire circus to cater for this device. Thus, I refuse to believe your hypothesis.
Maybe all browsers should just replace the user agent on all platforms wit "none of your business!" And sue all websites that break because of browser sniffing.
I mean, it's already pretty useless even for statistics since most browsers just fakes parts or all of it. Any niche browser is basically forced to pretend to be another major browser, and as this video informs us almost all major browsers like about the architecture, already.
@@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug its really useless, both in js and css there are ways to check if a browser supports something already. why would anyone use user-agent string is beyond me. it should be deprecated already
User-Agent: nunya
Amazon Prime video just blindly trusts the UA string, which was why I couldn't get HD playback on Chromebooks, but I could on Windows/Mac with the same browsers. Changing the UA to claim to be the Windows/Mac version of Chome lets me get HD video. With a plugin I can have that happen automatically, and without affecting every other site.
Now here it is actually a DRM issue, on Mac/Windows Prime Video can setup a secure path of pixels from the player to the screen so you can't screen-capture HD Prime Video easily using OBS or built-in tools, but it's either not possible to do in Linux/Chrome OS, or they couldn't be certain that it could be enforced properly, so those OS's are restricted to SD resolutions because Amazon can't be certain that the secure path exists.
However, if their "security" is reliant on the UA string, I don't feel bad at all for bypassing it to gain access to HD resolutions.
you should not feel bad about bypassing DRM on anything ever
it may or may not be illegal, but you should never feel bad about it
I'm tempted to change my useragent to report that I'm running TempleOS on a 6502, just to see what sites break in interesting ways.
Yes, tempting. I might have picked Sinclair Spectrum as the machine.
@@kensmith5694 I'm expressing admirable restraint by not setting it up as a TI 99/4a. TMS9900 CPU and the "OS" is GPL(graphics programming language, I believe).
I did this for a few years, and maybe it's more about the particular sites I visit, but I mostly didn't notice a difference. I remember Slack refusing to work, I don't know if I had any other overrides set up.
@@capability-snob Most sites won't break, but I'm hoping the ones that do break hilariously.
Worst-case, I generate some weird noise in the web usage statistics.
My UA is Meta Toaster. I get burnt on both server and client sides 😂
Microsoft does this. If your user agent is Windows, you can't get an iso. Any other OS though, it just gives you the download link.
What? Really??
Is this a US thing? Because I can download Windows ISOs at work just fine from my company (Windows-)notebook.
yeah they do it for win10, at least on the win11 they always give you the choice
That sounds like a thing Microsoft would do, though I doubt it. Not that it really matters. The Windows ISOs have not been able to be utilized as a bootable device via USB for a considerable amount of time. Even when they would actually boot it wouldn't let you install Windows onto your machine. It kept saying that the file system, which is included in the ISO itself, was not valid to boot Windows from.
If you want a flash drive with Windows and run Linux on your own machine, you first need to download the Windows ISO, run it in a virtual machine, install their Media Creation Tool within the virtual machine, then pass through your USB to the virtual machine so their program can write it for you. It's been like this for A LONG time, and that's the only way it works... Unless you're up to setting up the Windows bootloader manually.
@@trajectoryunown I swear you must’ve come up with the weirdest and most awkward way to make a bootable Windows ISO.
There is a much easier way:
Step 1. Install Ventoy on an USB stick
Step 2. Copy Windows ISO to it.
Step 3. Proceed with Windows installation as usual.
You can keep as many ISOs to boot on that USB stick as you want as long as you have enough space on it.
So devices are changing the UA to work around websites not processing it correctly. And websites are incorrectly parsing the UA to work around devices not properly reporting it. Why are we still using this thing?
Every Brodie typo takes away one of my lives
I'm more concerned that you don't have only one life, than I am from knowing that Brodie using language improperly takes one away from you.
@@dsihacks Five are left out of nine
@@dsihacks OP is a cat.
Ever*
The user agent issues are probably why sites end up collecting traffic stats that are garbage. So they assume Windows has a higher market share and should be targeted more strongly, when it's just people changing their UA to deal with this kind of BS.
Yup exactly. On the WAN show last week (I think?) they showed their FloatPlane user statistics. The problem being that it wasn't self-reported, but based on what information could be scraped from users' browsers - which very likely includes a big chunk of lies due to users changing their user agent for better support on some sites.
8:24 for reference, that API is supported since 2018 or 2019 depending on the browser.
On the other hand it is interesting that a bug against Firefox is filed, even if the actual bug is in YT. Guess it's easier to file a bug in Firefox than YT.
(I'm ignoring the fact that the bug report just tries to have Firefox behave the same way as other browsers or even Firefox on Windows itself and just uses YT as an example)
It's a CZcams bug that you only know about because of a Firefox bug
THIS!
@@BrodieRobertson I still don't get how anything that firefox is doing here is a bug. Surely, Firefox reporting the platform is intended behavior and the only problem is with the other side.
In my understanding, the proposed fix of "just lie and say that you are x86/x64" is basically introducing a bug in Firefox to bypass third party bug.
@@killerexe007 it lies on every OS except for Linux, it should lie consistently
This is one of those weird situations where, if your product reaches mass-enough adoption, "who is in charge of bug fixes" becomes a lot more blurred. The UA is abused a lot for things it's not supposed to communicate, and thus it's Firefox's problem to solve.
Also want to say this is not the dumbest firefox bug.
That one goes to the one around the ::first-letter pseudo element.
In Dutch we have a digraph for the ij written as ij. When starting a sentence with it you capitalize both letters, however the ::first-letter speudo element only selects the "I" which is wrong.
It took 20 years for Firefox to adjust this. Chromium and Webkit still have it as an open issue, however those only got opened when it got included into the w3 spec.
Best part is after they fixed it it introduced issues with some rare cases where nouns starting wit Ij got targetted. Because of course it does. Now first-letter treats ij and IJ as one but not Ij. In Firefox at least.
To be fair, I've never seen or written the two characters as one. It's always "ij" and not "ij" (if you can even tell the difference).
non-Dutch reading this: 💫 😵
@@xmvziron I know, just happened to have a eurkey keyboard layout set so alt-gr + k writes it. I sometimes use it to see if something breaks, of course practically noone actually uses it like that.
@@josephbrandenburg4373 if you are German pronounce it as ei if you are english pronounce it as y, that could help a bit.
@@xmvziron tiny improvement in kerning i guess?
Soo... If I change the user agent, will my tiny phone become a huge TV screen?
Sounds great!
I would consider that a "dark mode" version of the outro.
CZcams constantly does this for no good reason, slowing down load times and removing options based on the user agent string. Weve heard this before with them adding 5 seconds of lag to the webpage loading screen on Firefox.
That story was not Firefox-specific. It was an experiment to make adblock users wait the same 5 seconds that non-adblock users would have to wait until clicking the skip ad button. Regardless of the browser used. Also, not all users were affected, it was a small sample AB test, so if you opened it in a different browser, your fingerprint changed and most likely it was not in the test group.
@@szaszm_2 ads in row was first a experiment only for some people. Blocking adblock only affected some people at first. They do experiments all the time. Even removing dislikes. I myself remember them removing sort by oldest but couldn't find many info on it. Later they removed sort by oldest and then brought it back
Just because it affects few doesn't mean it will affect many later
@@szaszm_ Nah, it was specific. Until people started talking about it, then it went after other browsers.
The wonders of live updating code like what websites run on. You don't have to wait for an update, it just happens live next time you refresh the page it can be an entirely different script.
During the entire process I never experienced the problem, it was a small experiment to mess with adblock, nothing more
@@BrodieRobertson it had no impact on adblock, and impacted non adblock users just as much.
And it is still happening today. So its not a small experiment if its been this way for several months, which it has been by now.
That's why I always have my user agent faked to most common one, i.e. Windows.
This is the first ever documented case of Architecture Racism...
I am user agent fluid. I am 32 bit windows xp today on Opera.
9:12 The GPU drivers have nothing to do with hardware video decoding (H.264, H.265). There is a dedicated part of the SoC (e.g. M1 chip) which deals with that kind of stuff, which currently doesn't have any Linux support at the moment. eiln (one of the Asahi devs who also got the webcam and Neural Engine working) is working on that, she reverse engineered a good chunk of it, but a Linux driver has yet to be written. As for the GPU drivers themselves, save for Vulkan and Blender, they work perfectly fine.
I guess he linked them together because on traditional computers usually the GPU is the one that also deals with hardware deciding and encoding
@@idk-sy3iu Full Motion Vidya
Javascript was the first dumb decision made by browsers.
That's it, that's the comment.
true. Let's get back to the days when everything ran on Flash and ActiveX. /s
because you totally couldn't do the same nonsense Serverside...
Yes, mainly because JS is really impossible to learn even if you study it.
Regarding detecting stuff as mobile - I have a vertical screen and a lot of websites, if I access then on the vertical screen decided that I'm on mobile - one most annoying offender is Pinterest, who I've opened one time on my vertical screen and now it always shows me the mobile UI, regardless which screen in opening it on.
Also, 240 isn't 5 times less than 1080 - it's 24 times less data intensive. Think 2D - the width also shrinks by comparable amount.
Hanlon's razor:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
This is truly one of the videos every made.
12:50 personally id really prefer if websites never did that, ive had so many times that a page tells me "sorry, your platform isnt supported" when i try to download a windows exe to run under wine, or to put on a usb drive for another system. Yeah i can just change my user agent, but its annoying and really unnecessary.
You promised me dumbest web browser decision ever and Internet Explorer 6 is still undefeated for running as administrator.
I would normally let it pass but I just had a strong beer, to me that's a CZcams bug and a Firefox default configuration issue.
Wonder if this might explain why my Firefox on arch arm64 running on my s23+ gets low res on CZcams, but works fine in chrome. I'm gonna change my agent string and see if I get higher res.
Never ascribe to malice, anything that can be explained by incompetence.
With Raspberry Pi 4 and especially with the new software versions released for Raspberry Pi 5, more people are using Firefox on Raspberry Pi, so this could theoretically come up. I think, however, that it may register as having hardware decoding on a Raspberry Pi with the latest version.
my best browser detection issue was some years ago on a new windows installation. no gpu drivers meant 480x640 resolution or something like that. nvidia site thought I was on mobile and told me to open the page on a desktop browser to see the download link.
the real dumbest firefox bug is the memory leaks that have never been fixed in decades
Google doesn't know how to make websites.
Lol the outtro was literally "Brodie after dark". love it
At the time I ran an extension called "Fire something" - in the days of Ice Weasel there was a proliferation of rebuild of Firefox names "XElement YAnimal", so "Fire Something" would generate a random "element" and random animal to name your browser every time you relaunched it.
W3C is still crying to sleep after all these years
Because of CZcams I actually switched my User-Agent to Curl because most others don't work with their Adblocker-Blocker
I have a riscv64 device that basically has no businesses doing 4k at all, and the option of doing 4k still pops up.
How bad does it run if you click it
@@BrodieRobertson runs till the buffer ends, and just locks up trying to render something while the buffer gets longer
I don't completely blame CZcams devs for this, because I'd probably do the same thing given what I assume were some really stupid demands from management. The HiSense brand is just such a tiny subset, but management wants ads shown for that sweet cash, and I can't dedicate a team or myself more than a few hours because it's so tiny. It sucks, but it's extremely common.
Oh! This is relating to what Louis Rossman was talking about, but with Netflix. He mentioned how quality on his TV was crippled in the browser, but was full resolution in the Netflix app. Maybe they use google's apis internally somehow?
Probably.
I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox on Galaxy S20's DEX mode suffers from similar issues since it always shows me mobile versions when I consider to zoom in or out and sticks with it.
This is not a firefox bug? Its a really weird CZcams bug.
Merry Christmas and thanks for our near-daily distraction from the real life!
And a firefox consistency bug as it doesnt happen on windows only linux
the brodie dementia saga continues
Heads up, there is a typo in the title: Every -> Ever
basically, brody, youtube is saying : "linux, you are TOO SECURE, you have to suffer for it".
Here at google, we don't like how secure Linux is and how much data we can't collect from you. As such, we are punishing all Linux users by screwing over the video quality in the hopes that you're a new user and will see it, conclude that Linux is crap, and promptly move back to Windows where we can start advertising to you once more.
Classic scenario of, Company makes "new device" then blames support on some random software they pulled off the shelf instead of fixing it themselves.
Just checked: my m2 ipad pro has user agent from intel mac…
As a firefox user I noticed that CZcams just ran like shit, So I changed my user-agent to Chrome and haven't had problems since.
For my split-tunnel 'stealth/VPN' FF browser, I use a fingerprint rotator add-on, Chameleon 0.22.52. Works okay UNLESS it rotates me into presenting as an IE of any kind. Then I get 'browser no longer supported' message. Running on M1 mini.
Often times the difference between incompetence and evil is vanishingly small.
I was running Linux desktop on low power ARM chromebooks years ago, yeah, let's say very good battery life. Struggled with 1080p though.
There is a Firefox add-in for changing the user agent string which should be a workable workaround for this issue as well.
I used to get so annoyed over your old outro I used to deliberately end the video when I realized your essay was over... I am very glad that you don't use the old outro anymore 👍🏽
new youtube frontend code has always been bad.
you can feel its a mess, because of the dumb bugs you occur while using it and how laggy its
Time to reduce the user-agent strings to something like "Mozilla Firefox on Linux" or "Google Chrome on Windows".
Strip all the version data, architectures and whatever engine information that we don't need to give away anyways.
Better yet "W3C HTML5 compliant browser"
They shouldn't need anything more than that.
@@kensmith5694 I'd rather see the UserAgent just being completely omitted though.
download pages are the only thing they're good for.
@@kensmith5694 HTML 5 is a living standard so saying you support it doesn't supply any useful information.
@@eDoc2020 I disagree.
@@kensmith5694 Firefox 3.6 is a W3C HTML5 compliant browser. Most modern websites don't work on that browser. Basically _all_ browsers are HTML5 so my point remains that saying so in your user agent is useless. Having said that I agree they shouldn't need more, specifically they shouldn't need anything.
Side note, the W3C HTML5 specs are retired, now everybody uses the WHATWG spec.
That's why both Chrome and Safari froze their user agent and claim to be Intel Macs on ARM Macs. Desktop Chrome has, regardless of version, one of three user agents, one for Windows, one for Linux and one for Mac.
Hopefully they hardcode the Linux and/or Firefox version in general. Running *nix Firefox pretty much instantly fingerprints you because the useragent is THAT specific. Something like Am I Unique puts me at
Yooo, Hector Martin!
I haven't heard about him since the drama around Byuu supposedly game ending himself.
I still have my user agent string on edge on windows, because otherwise weird stuff happens with microsoft teams and I need that for work. Now I regularly get worried my spotify got hacked because it tells me it's playing on windows.
when you put all this together i would say it was all done for least compute required
personally i wouldnt call them evil or incompetent
dude reporting the problem doesn't even realize just how bad it is. 1080p isn't 5x the bandwidth of 240p, it's 20x. YT thinks ARM is 20x worse than Wintel
Why is firefox reporting arm only on Linux both Windows and MacOS arm can run x86 code while Linux can’t so if you get a x86 executable it works on Windows and MacOS but not on Linux. How do websites determine which executable you get, from the user agent string.
You got a typo in the title my friend
rendering engine bad decisions are one thing, but UI/UX bad decisions are what kills the browser market
why can't we have good browsers anymore? in 2017 we lost Firefox after losing Opera in 2012...
Even a Raspberry Pi 4 can handle 1080p. But Google being Google. The only thing missing is having some extra garbage code to make the system purposefully slow.
This went dark very quick towards the end xD
My Athlon 64 X2 from 2005 was capable of software decoding for Blu-Ray, which uses extremely high bitrates. Pretty sure your typical ARM CPU these days should be able to handle at least 1080p.
And they are. Even when it first came out the RPi3 was capable of handling 1080p video with hardware decoding. The Pi4 could handle 4k right off, and now they've got the Pi5.
Why this check even exists? If I, as a user, want to play 4K video on my RPi at 3 FPS, I should be able to. Maybe there is actual good reason someone has to do so. But no… Some dev must pretend that he/she/it(AI) is actually doing something useful and/or pretends to be smarter that he/she/it really is.
tell them ur a good boy on windows using chrome
Probably they assume "ARM == phone" and they want you to use the app instead of a browser. Remember when they didn't want Windows Phones to connect to CZcams?
The user agent string is also used for analytics/telemetry stuff. If every browser just identifies as Chrome x86 on Windows then it would increase the assumption that a tiny part of the population use anything other than Chrome on a Intel PC running Windows.
We should all report to be IE4 on Solaris running SPARC
It shouldn't even tell the OS
Solid outro
Oh no! European power prices have reached Down Under!
Power has gotten so expensive that Brodie can't afford to keep the lights on for the outro :D
the end lmao
Dark Brodie! lol.
Hehe, my User Agent string has this: Windows NT 10.0. Which is really strange, as I'm running Linux Mint. Maybe my VPN does some tricks?
dark mode outro
eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
I love my Pinebook, which also runs a Linux desktop on arm.
Many sites and services use the UA, heck, many devices in your home don’t negotiate capabilities, they just rely on their UA (with some tagged on stuff) so the server application can identify it as it’s faster, in basically every query and doesn’t require entire chitchat to get the capabilities. You have a stb, smart tv, phone or anything else connecting to a video platform? That’s how these work (and have worked for over a decade) so the server can select appropriate mediastream to allow the device to connect to… many device manufacturers and client developers don’t event realize this, they just build some random stuff and the server is to magically know what device it is?
So CZcams has a dodgy profile for that UA since it’s historic when that device released, it had issues and got a limited profile hardcoded in, now it gets in the way of some random obscure shite that makes noise…make enough noise and CZcams will fix it…
Remember times when IE devs complained about Google crumbling IE performance on purpose? Happened before they moved to Chromium i think they got enough of that.
That was after they rebranded to Edge, but yep. Google kept changing it in ways that hit worst case performance in Edge but not Chromium.
How is this a firefox bug? This is a bug in youtube's clientside code
Right but that bug was revealed because of a firefox bug
Firefox is supposed to lie about the architecture for privacy reasons, like it does on mac and windows, just on linux it tells the truth
My phone's user agent identified it as android mobile (mobian on a pinephone). Switching it to desktop linux x86_64, youtube background play now works.
8:30 - that's a wrong assumption. The only right way to choose the default quality is through a setting kept inside local storage/cookies.
Typo in title i think he meant to say ever
If I ever make a browser I amgoing to just leave user agent blank.
Notably the low power Raspberry Pi has been able to do 4k since the pi4 came out. Maybe not on CZcams, but the pi 5 can.
Just set my useragent to "Ligma"
Hilarious how your voice gets darker along with your room 😁
This morning I was watching a CZcams video on Firefox and it was stuttering badly. So I opened it in Vivaldi and it played fine.
There may be something to this Google targeting Firefox after all 🤔
Got a like just for the end outro XD
Do be aware that it’s possible to tell if a user agent is spoofed and what the true web engine and OS are. Without privacy protections, a lot more can be inferred too. Using a spoofed user agent is therefore considered bad for privacy.
If by that you mean that it gives a false sense of privacy as opposed to actual privacy, then sure, but otherwise the UA should be ignored by all and not even used anymore.
dark brodie at end lol
I think it's stupid to limit resolutions/limits (or anything other) in the first place. Just don't do it, and give the user to overrule settings.
Why also report the OS - the only useful feature for this, is to have an active session system.
Browsers should only give websites the user agent string after the user has given permission - like with camera/mic etc
I honestly liked the dark mode outro
I'm on Linux but my user agent claims I'm using Windows 10. Interesting.
I know I'm only a few minutes into this but isn't it more accurate to say this is a CZcams bug?
Ah! Now I see why - Firefox on macOS reports the browser as Intel Mac. I still stand firm, this isn't Firefox's problem - it's CZcams's.
@@TheVincentKyleit's a problem of every website that makes use of user agent string.
It's a bit of both, Firefox only has this behaviour on Linux
@@BrodieRobertson But you also said that Firefox also lies and states it's an Intel CPU, as well as other browsers on other OSes doing the same - I think it's indicative of a top-down problem where CZcams should be able to just use the media API and other tools like measuring bitrate, window size and overall screen resolution and likely several other tools available to the client to make an intelligent decision to best serve the client and they just....don't. Implying this is in any way Firefox's problem in the media is just gonna end up killing Firefox faster, which is bad for all of us.
@@TheVincentKyle It's not uncommon that browsers especially the smaller ones have to work around badly coded websites
I don't like the clickbait "Firefox is bad" title. This was WAY more an issue on CZcams using the user agent in a horrific way... even when Google's web division says specifically NOT to use the user agent for well... pretty much anything other than analytics to see how many people are using X platform. In fact, Google has repeatedly talked about removing the user agent altogether. Mozilla having an oopsy at some point in the past and maybe not having the resources to fix it right this very moment is not a "this is just a firefox problem." As you explained in the video, many systems are seeing this same issue. While Firefox should go along with what all other browsers are doing, it's a much bigger black mark on CZcams that they are clearly using the user agent to determine client capabilities when they absolutely should not.
3:39 is that a surprise? Try reading their APi documentation (e.g. gsheet) - utter garbage, rage inducing garbage... :) I am under the impression they either hire people who have an urge to gloat or think they are paid per word like a journalist or something :). On the other hand, I 'kind of' understand the reasoning behind this particular case? Someone did some user experience testing and concluded that a user who experiences choppy video, assumes 'something is broken' and closes the youtube app on their device. And that's baaad :) so it's better to assume it's some low-power device, cripple the quality in favour of performance. I would prefer to be ASKED instead, but given the tech--savviness of the general population, especially if we are talking users of 'smart' TVs with embedded browser - I guess Google has a db of known devices and predefined 'specs' for each.