Our custom firefox useragent prevents Fedora users from watching netflix on Firefox

[Elad Alfassa <elad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Netflix have recently (and also, finally) started supporting Firefox on Linux, which is great for Fedora users who want to watch Netflix without having to install Chrome or Chromium.

However, there's a catch: our default Firefox user agent is blocked by Netflix.

If you try to use Firefox on Fedora to watch netflix, you'd get an error message that silverlight is required.

If you then change the user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0" (you can set general.useragent.override in about:config)  and try again, netflix will work without any problem.

I think we should fix this, because it's silly to force user to install a non-default browser to do this kind of thing.

There are two ways we could fix this:

1) Stop using a custom user agent. This also has the benefit of making Fedora users a bit less trackable, but the downside of not having a way to measure active Fedora users online (which is why the custom one was re-introduced, iirc).

2) Someone with an official position within Fedora / Red Hat could email Netflix and ask them to stop blocking our custom user agent.

I think Netflix's rationale for blocking non-upstream user agents is that their "help page" says "Supported on stable, official release builds from Mozilla. Non-Mozilla builds are not supported.".

Considering the fact that most Linux users (and especially Fedora users) don't run the mozilla builds, and that Firefox in Fedora meets all of mozilla's branding guidelines to be eligible for officially calling itself Firefox, I think that limitation is silly, so we probably should convince Netflix to change their user agent blocking policy.

--

-Elad.

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