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Just got the Firefox 49 update (yay!)

But Netflix still wants to install Silverlight (boo!)

How can I watch Netflix in Firefox, as has been advertised?

Organic Marble
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    Your linked article had this line "It’s unlikely that Netflix and company will flip the switch for Linux Firefox users right away, so some short-term user-agent switching may be necessary (as it was on Chrome to begin with)." – Anwar Sep 22 '16 at 14:48
  • I can't even get Netflix to play on Firefox on Windows, which the article claims is already possible, so I think Netflix is currently only allowing it for Chrome regardless of Firefox's technical support for it. Changing the user agent as stated below seems like the only way. – Aaron Franke Sep 22 '16 at 15:32
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    In case someone is still stuck on this in 2020. I was missing : sudo apt install libavcodec-extra This command solved my issue, I am using Ubuntu 20.04 with Firefox 71. – Varad Bhatnagar Jun 02 '20 at 19:44

2 Answers2

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As wisely mentioned in comments: if you have this problem, contact Netflix support about it. It's a problem to be fixed on their side, and the more complains they'd get, the faster it get fixed.

A solution by GizmoChicken:

Is anyone able to play Netflix? With the original user agent it requests to install silverlight With chrome user agent it plays, but with tearing and high cpu load.

Netflix plays for me on Firefox 49 when using the following User-Agent entry:

Linux / Chrome 53: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.34 Safari/537.36

Sometimes I have to hit "refresh" to start a video. I don't recall ever having to do that with Chrome. So it's still not perfect.

===================================== (edit by OP)

Before using the user agent string above (which worked) I had to do two other things.

  1. Get Firefox to install the Widevine plugin by ticking the box on Preferences/Content labeled Play DRM Content.
  2. Install User Agent Overrider extension. Then go to the extension's preferences and add the user agent string above.

Then just select the Linux / Chrome 53 user agent, go to Netflix.com, and Bob's yer uncle.

Edit 2: This also works on 32 bit Ubuntu! Woo hoo!

Edit 3: At least as of April 2017, 32 bit no longer works, but the user agent workaround is no longer required.

Edit 4: One of the many awesome enhancements in Firefox Quantum is that Netflix works again in 32 bit! (Dec 2017)

Organic Marble
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Hi-Angel
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    Thanks, that worked. I'm going to edit your answer a bit to include all the steps I had to do. – Organic Marble Sep 22 '16 at 15:29
  • This is messing up Google Drive for me. I'm getting the mobile view on desktop. – TenLeftFingers Sep 23 '16 at 13:24
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    @TenLeftFingers from a quick search you could try this extension to override a user agent only for Netflix. – Hi-Angel Sep 23 '16 at 16:23
  • @TenLeftFingers If you choose to stick with this user agent overrider, just click on the user agent button, set it to Default and F5 to refresh. – Dennis Sep 23 '16 at 20:14
  • http://mybrowseraddon.com/useragent-switcher.html also works, but you need to select chrome+linux and then edit the user-agent, to update chrome version to 53 – higuita Sep 24 '16 at 23:22
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    Props to Amazon Video for this working immediately upon the upgrade to Firefox 49. Upon starting video on Amazon, you just get prompted to install Widevine, which will of course work with Netflix after the above User Agent spoofing. – Canuteson Sep 26 '16 at 03:20
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    I'd also highly recommend everyone contact Netflix asking them to fix this. Spoofing our user-agent is something we shouldn't have to do. – Canuteson Sep 26 '16 at 12:58
  • I don't use Netflix, so this may not work, but you might want to look at pipelight which is supposed to provide Silverlight functionality. https://launchpad.net/pipelight – Joe Sep 29 '16 at 05:00
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    @Joe given there's another workaround, I think using Pipelight is a bad way, at first because it is a support of a proprietary technology that ought to be replaced with HTML5, at second because SilverLight is deprecated as of 2013 year anyway. – Hi-Angel Sep 29 '16 at 07:37
  • I get error code M7363-1260 (update widevine or chrome) with this user-agent. I even tried upgrading it to the latest Chrome User Agent. (53.0.2785.144) I also find that switching to a Windows Firefox user-agent doesn't work, but gives error F7363-1260. I presume this means update widevine or Firefox. – trlkly Oct 02 '16 at 03:14
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    I also tried using the same user agent (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.108 Safari/537.36) from my copy of Chromium with Widevine, which still works for Netflix. But in Firefox it's still the M7363-1260 error. – trlkly Oct 02 '16 at 03:19
  • @trlkly it's definitely Netflix broke something. Try to contact them. – Hi-Angel Oct 02 '16 at 06:49
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    This user agent works for my firefox netflix access: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0 – ubfan1 Oct 27 '16 at 04:48
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    The above Linux / Chrome 53 string does not work for me. I am running Firefox 50.0.2 on Ubuntu 14.04. I get an error message: [...] Please make sure you are on an official version of Chrome. Error Code: M7355-1204 I tried some other user agent strings as well. Everything I tried failed with various error codes. – mpb Dec 08 '16 at 04:14
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    This works, but I highly recommend everyone reporting this issue to Firefox. They really only need to alter their user-agent detection to allow you to watch Netflix without hacks.

    I'd also recommend every time you watch Netflix this way, you first attempt with the UA spoofer disabled, so an error with your user-agent is most likely logged with Netflix, so they can get realistic numbers about people who want to watch Netflix using Firefox on Linux.

     – Canuteson Jan 07 '17 at 01:19
  • @Canuteson well, altering a user-agent is a hack, but altering it on behalf of Mozilla would be an even worse hack. They won't do that. But ⁺¹ because I see that it could probably be indirectly useful: upon getting complains, Mozilla could try themselves contacting Netflix. – Hi-Angel Jan 07 '17 at 06:58
  • I'm not saying altering it on behalf of Mozilla. I'm saying if you're going to hack your user agent string to watch Netflix, wait until after you get the error message, so Netflix knows Firefox Linux users are trying to use their service. – Canuteson Jan 08 '17 at 18:48
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    A plugin I found useful is Custom UserAgent String, which allows you to set a custom user agent per-domain. – Marcello Romani Jan 15 '17 at 22:51
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download vlc media player.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc browser-plugin-vlc

I guess vlc downloads the necessary libraries, but Netflix now plays with absolutely no problem in Firefox 54.

Worth noting this also worked when I was running Firefox 47.

Sumeet Deshmukh
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