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Websites I visit on Firefox think I'm using Linux. I'm using Windows 10. I've lost a lot of website functionality due to this, how do I fix it?

  • 2 replies
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  • Last reply by James

PaintedLoyalty
PaintedLoyalty

I first found I had this problem when I went to check my email. Normally I wouldn't mind that it started me in the basic HTML version, but I needed to be able to use chat so I could fix my phone service (a very long story).

I knew it did this sometimes when my random agent spoofer plugin was randomly set to a Linux OS (Basically just tricks websites into thinking I'm using a different browser and PC), so I went to set it to something else when I discovered it was no longer in my toolbar. I went to the plugins page and it was there among the legacy plugins. I removed both of the legacy plugins that were there and restarted firefox. No change.

I restarted Firefox in safe mode, which is what it's in now while I'm typing this. No change.

I used ipchicken.com to confirm what it thought I was using (because it was correct in its guesses before when I tested it with the addon)

My theory is that when updating, Firefox decided to take the OS data that was last used as my identity, but I don't know how to remedy this.

I'm using the new Firefox Quantum on Windows 10.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

I first found I had this problem when I went to check my email. Normally I wouldn't mind that it started me in the basic HTML version, but I needed to be able to use chat so I could fix my phone service (a very long story). I knew it did this sometimes when my random agent spoofer plugin was randomly set to a Linux OS (Basically just tricks websites into thinking I'm using a different browser and PC), so I went to set it to something else when I discovered it was no longer in my toolbar. I went to the plugins page and it was there among the legacy plugins. I removed both of the legacy plugins that were there and restarted firefox. No change. I restarted Firefox in safe mode, which is what it's in now while I'm typing this. No change. I used ipchicken.com to confirm what it thought I was using (because it was correct in its guesses before when I tested it with the addon) My theory is that when updating, Firefox decided to take the OS data that was last used as my identity, but I don't know how to remedy this. I'm using the new Firefox Quantum on Windows 10. Any suggestions are appreciated.
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Modified by PaintedLoyalty

Chosen solution

I found a solution

I followed the directions on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox up to the point where it said "Right-click on each of these preferences" and instead reset the preferences that were bolded and said "Modified"

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PaintedLoyalty
PaintedLoyalty Question owner

Chosen Solution

I found a solution

I followed the directions on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox up to the point where it said "Right-click on each of these preferences" and instead reset the preferences that were bolded and said "Modified"

Modified by PaintedLoyalty

James
James
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It does appear to be due to the Random Agent Spoofer extension that changed the general.useragent.override and general.useragent.vendor Preferences so you had a useragent of Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.21 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.14.3 Safari/537.21

Not the best idea to have random UA's in use as it can cause websites problems if they serve something different based on browser or OS used.

Modified by James