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Could it be you are using an incompatible Browser? E.g. Chrome on Windows works not very good the native Netflix windows app delivers a way better quality

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TIL there's a Windows app, I'll try that out as well, thank you. FWIW I haven't noticed huge differences on Chrome and Firefox on Win10, I usually blamed the wifi for bad quality though.

Chrome and Firefox use the same DRM (Google Widevine), so they receive the same 720p video from Netflix. Edge and Safari get 1080p because the use hardware-based DRM (Microsoft PlayReady and Apple FairPlay, respectively).

Isn't that because Chrome refuses to add the DRM netflix needs for 1080p content? (I believe it was silverlight)

I think it's much more arbitrary. Silverlight is on life support with support for EME/HTML5 video on most platforms, but Netflix has historically chosen to only support 1080p video on the first-party browser for any given OS (Chrome on ChromeOS, Safari on macOS, and IE/Edge on Windows).

EDIT: Looking at some stuff, it seems like Netflix might "trust" a first-party browser to select the highest-quality stream that it has hardware video decode support for. In comparison, it sounds like there are extensions that enable 1080p in Chrome by pushing it into the list of playlist options, but it can cause a serious performance hit by decoding on the CPU.

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