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 Alfassa píše v Pá 07. 04. 2017 v 19:07 +0300:
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:
- 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).
- 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.
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Hi Elad, we're aware of this issue. We're currently working on the solution #2.
Netflix is not blocking non-upstream user agents, they're blocking Fedora specifically! Replace Fedora with a random string and it will work. This is strange and we wanna find out why they're doing it.
Note that they do the same with Chrome where we have a Fedora user agent, too. The reason why it works is that we put a logic in the user agent extension which removes Fedora from the user agent for the netflix.com domain. We could do the same for Firefox, but I think it's better to solve this with Netflix.
Jiri
On Fri, 2017-04-07 at 19:14 +0200, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Note that they do the same with Chrome where we have a Fedora user agent, too. The reason why it works is that we put a logic in the user agent extension which removes Fedora from the user agent for the netflix.com domain. We could do the same for Firefox, but I think it's better to solve this with Netflix.
FWIW, in WebKit we have a list of websites that we send custom ("fake") user agents to. E.g. we send Firefox user agents to all Google domains. We do not contact websites to try to get them fixed; it's a waste of time, we just add them to our user agent quirks list. So if Netflix doesn't respond soon, then I strongly suggest patching Firefox similarly. I'm convinced it's impossible to make *any* change to the user agent without breaking websites, so having such a quirks list is going to be important for some other website sooner or later. I'm actually surprised it hasn't caused any problems prior to now.
Michael
On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 12:33 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Fri, 2017-04-07 at 19:14 +0200, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Note that they do the same with Chrome where we have a Fedora user agent, too. The reason why it works is that we put a logic in the user agent extension which removes Fedora from the user agent for the netflix.com domain. We could do the same for Firefox, but I think it's better to solve this with Netflix.
FWIW, in WebKit we have a list of websites that we send custom ("fake") user agents to. E.g. we send Firefox user agents to all Google domains. We do not contact websites to try to get them fixed; it's a waste of time, we just add them to our user agent quirks list. So if Netflix doesn't respond soon, then I strongly suggest patching Firefox similarly. I'm convinced it's impossible to make *any* change to the user agent without breaking websites, so having such a quirks list is going to be important for some other website sooner or later. I'm actually surprised it hasn't caused any problems prior to now.
Haha this is funny. So in effect the reported UA is completely unreliable but websites continue to rely upon it and use it to disenfranchise users.
Am I understanding this correctly?
On Fri, 2017-04-07 at 12:55 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 12:33 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro@gnome. org> wrote:
On Fri, 2017-04-07 at 19:14 +0200, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Note that they do the same with Chrome where we have a Fedora user agent, too. The reason why it works is that we put a logic in the user agent extension which removes Fedora from the user agent for the netflix.com domain. We could do the same for Firefox, but I think it's better to solve this with Netflix.
FWIW, in WebKit we have a list of websites that we send custom ("fake") user agents to. E.g. we send Firefox user agents to all Google domains. We do not contact websites to try to get them fixed; it's a waste of time, we just add them to our user agent quirks list. So if Netflix doesn't respond soon, then I strongly suggest patching Firefox similarly. I'm convinced it's impossible to make *any* change to the user agent without breaking websites, so having such a quirks list is going to be important for some other website sooner or later. I'm actually surprised it hasn't caused any problems prior to now.
Haha this is funny. So in effect the reported UA is completely unreliable but websites continue to rely upon it and use it to disenfranchise users.
Am I understanding this correctly?
Yes.
Dan
Elad Alfassa píše v Pá 07. 04. 2017 v 19:07 +0300:
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:
- 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).
- 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.
The problem seems to be solved. The Netflix guys responded pretty quickly.
Jiri
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