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Automatic user agent spoofing in Firefox 51


Sfor

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The Firefox 52 ESR seems to be problematic with the flash support. So, it looks like the best choice is 51.

But, I'm encountering more and more problems related to the accessing different sites. On one site I have to spoof the user agent string to Firefox 69. On other it works if the string is not spoofed, but does not work correctly with 69. So, it would be good to have an user agent string switcher, able to switch the string depending on the site.

I found Custom UserAgent String to be working well, but only on Firefox 52. With the older 51 it installs, but does nothing.

 

So I'm looking for some user agent string switcher able to work with Firefox 51.

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According to the specifications it should work with firefox 48 and newer. But for some reason it does not work with 51.

And no, I did not try any older version. My goal is to get it working with 51, as this version is working very well. Also it seems to be the last one with plain old Java support.

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Well. On some sites, it does not play flash content. It just displays notification, the Adobe Flash plugin is enabled with two buttons: 1. to disable it 2. to let it be enabled. After letting it be enabled the same notification pops up again. On other sites everything works, but the same notification appears randomly. It comes from plugin manager, or something like that.

I did many experiments, and it looks like everything works fine, but after updating Adblock rules the particular site gets locked somehow. Disabling Adblock does not unlock it, however. In order to make it work again I have to restore the Firefox profile or create a new one. My profile was created long time ago in some old Firefox version. It could be possible, the settings were messed up somehow, with some upgrade on the way, I suppose.

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Test on a different computer with updated plugin produced the same results.

Always activate is selected. The notification states the plugin is active. If I select the button to deactivate it, I have to activate it in the next visit at the site. Then everything gets back to how it was before. I mean, the flash does not work.

Firefox 51 seems to be the last version with fully active NPAPI. Later versions do have just the Adobe Flash NPAPI support. All other NPAPI plugins are blocked there. In the 69 the NPAPI was disabled for good, as far as I remember.

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Certainly recent versions of Firefox only support the NPAPI Flash plugin, and no others (the latest version 69 will no longer allow you to set it to always activate) but Firefox 52.9 ESR certainly has full NPAPI plugin support, I have over 60 of them registered!
I would suggest that you try this with a temporary new clean Firefox profile, as corruption somewhere in the profile is the most likely cause of this issue.
Do you have an example of a site showing the problem just so I can make sure that it isn't happening on my system as well?!
:)

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I did test the problematic site https://www.tvn24.pl/ on a different computer. It had a copy of my "main" system made quite a few years ago, there. At first everything worked OK. Then I updated the Adblock rules to match the "main" system. Then everything started to show the same symptoms from the "main" system. The funniest thing is, symptoms did not rescind after disabling or removing Adblock. So Adblock rules were some sort of a one way switch, which made everything very difficult to analyze.

It could be difficult to reproduce the effect, as Lack of symptoms is not enough to get a definite conclusion, I'm afraid.

I had an opportunity to observe some sort of the profile data corruption during an upgrade from 51, before. Reverting to 51 rescinded the symptoms.

Since my Firefox profile accumulated a lot of passwords, bookmars, tweaks and such, I would have to invest quite some time in resetting the profile. I'm planning to do it, if the idea with improving the 51 fails.

Getting the same funcionality with 51 seemed to be faster and safer route.

Edited by Sfor
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Don't reset your existing profile, just make a temporary new clean one.
You can easily revert back to your previous one when you've finished testing.
The necessary dialogue is under "about:profiles".

The site you mention seems to work absolutely fine here in FF 52.9.
In fact the videos don't seem to be using Flash at all, they are using HTML5 video, which is what I would now expect.
There's no evidence here that it's loading the Flash plugin at all.
:)

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SFor said:


Firefox 51 seems to be the last version with fully active NPAPI. Later versions do have just the Adobe Flash NPAPI support. All other NPAPI plugins are blocked there.


Just to be sure, but you do have allowed all plugins by setting "plugin.load_flash_only = false"?
And check the prefs "plugin.scan.plid. ...." which plugins the browser shall find, either all or only specific ones.
And in another Mozilla-fork it was recommended to delete in the profile "pluginregs.dat", to refresh it.
And if existing, also delete the StartupCache folder in the profile... Edited by siria
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15 hours ago, Dave-H said:

Firefox 52.9 ESR certainly has full NPAPI plugin support

Indeed, and only the ESR versions of FF 52 have out-of-the-box support for all other NPAPI plugins. @siria 's tweak from above is needed to enable them in the "regular" 52.

As for @Sfor's original question about UA spoofing, I used Custom User Agent String for a while, but ultimately got fed up with its IMHO inconvenient and error-prone UI for managing the UA strings. Since then I've been using UAControl in conjunction with User-Agent JS Fixer. which also spoofs the UA JavaSript sees. UAControl, being a XUL extension, should work well with FF 51 as well, should you need to continue using that version.
 

Edited by mixit
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