Weird User Agent string

[Gary Gate]

I'm running Firefox beta on Linux Mint.

about:support shows a strange piece of information:

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/68.0

OS Linux 5.2.0-13-generic


Is it normal that Firefox announes itself as Windows NT 10.0 ??

[Chris Ilias]

Not if you're on Linux. :)
If the user-agent string is not accurate, it may have been changed by an
add-on you installed. To reset it, try the instructions in the following
article:
<https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox>

--
<https://ilias.ca/links>
Mailing list/Newsgroup moderator

[Gary Gate]

Thank you! However, I don't have any of the listed parameters in the
category general.useragent. The only ones are
general.useragent.compatMode.firefox and
general.useragent.site_specific_overrides

Maybe I need to do a complete reinstall.

[Paul in Houston, TX]

Nah, just change your UA string to what ever you want.

[WaltS48]

No.

How did you install the beta?

I have always installed from
<https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta/all/> and just update when
notified.

You seem to be using a very old beta. The current version is 69.0b15 and
the UA string is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/69.0

I'm using Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon with the Linux 4.15.0-58-generic kernel.

Try updating or a test profile.

[Gary Gate]

'About Firefox' says version 69.0b15, and it gets updated automatically
as usual.

Just to compare, I started the vanilla Firefox Mint version 68.02
Same useragent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Really weird.

[Jeff Layman]

I just fired up FF68.0.2 in my Mint 19.2 and about:support shows the
User Agent as:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

If "windows" is used as the search term in about:config, the only entry
under "Value " is windows-1252 in the fallbackCharset pref.

FWIW, my Pale Moon User Agent in about:support is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/4.3
Firefox/60.9 PaleMoon/28.6.1

But interestingly, using "windows" as the search term in about:config
brings up two prefs which have Values which include "windows":
general.useragent.override.players.brightcove.net Mozilla/5.0
(Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
general.useragent.override.web.whatsapp.com Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT
10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36
(it also shows "windows-1252" in the same pref as FF)

--

Jeff

[Chris Ilias]

We'll need some more info about your Firefox setup.
1. Click the menu button[=], then go to
Help-->Troubleshooting_Information, then click [Copy text to Clipboard].
2. Go to https://pastebin.com/ and go to Edit-->Paste to paste the info
from your Troubleshooting Information page, then click [Create New Paste].
3. In Firefox, click on the three dots to the right of the address, and
select "Copy Link".
4. Open a reply to this post, and go to Edit-->Paste to paste the info
from your Troubleshooting Information page.

[Gary Gate]

Here we go: https://pastebin.com/xzvhSD3k

[WaltS48]

Really strange UA string if you are using:

Name: Firefox
Version: 69.0b15
Build ID: 20190819184224
Update Channel: beta

Firefox 69.0b16 is out if you want to try updating.

--
OS: Ubuntu Linux 18.04LTS - Gnome Desktop
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/get-involved/
Fire the Apprentice!

[Chris Ilias]

On 2019-08-24 6:05 a.m., Gary Gate wrote:
>> On 2019-08-22 2:36 p.m., Gary Gate wrote:
>>> On 22/08/2019 20:21, Chris Ilias wrote:
>>>> On 2019-08-22 2:12 p.m., Gary Gate wrote:
>>>>> I'm running Firefox beta on Linux Mint.
>>>>>
>>>>>   about:support  shows a strange piece of information:
>>>>>
>>>>> User Agent    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101
>>>>> Firefox/68.0
>>>>>
>>>>> OS     Linux 5.2.0-13-generic
>>>>>
>>>>> Is it normal that Firefox announes itself as Windows NT 10.0 ??
>>>>
>>>> Not if you're on Linux. :)
>>>> If the user-agent string is not accurate, it may have been changed
>>>> by an add-on you installed. To reset it, try the instructions in the
>>>> following article:
>>>> <https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox>
>>>
>>> Thank you!  However, I don't have any of the listed parameters in the
>>> category general.useragent.  The only ones are
>>> general.useragent.compatMode.firefox  and
>>> general.useragent.site_specific_overrides
>>>
>>> Maybe I need to do a complete reinstall.
>

> Here we go:      https://pastebin.com/xzvhSD3k

Hi Gary,
I tried installing the same set of add-ons, but was unable to reproduce
the issue. The "Important Modified Preferences" section should only list
preferences that have been set to something other than the default
value, yet in your list, I see the following:
general.useragent.extra.firefox:
general.useragent.locale: en-US
general.useragent.security: U

Those should have been reset, per the support article above.

Let's try refreshing Firefox. This will purge a lot of your Firefox
files, while retaining most of your personal data. It's not included in
builds provided by the package manager, but because you're using beta,
I'll assume you downloaded from Mozilla.
For instructions, check out the following article:
<http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-preferences-fix-problems>

[Gary Gate]

Updated to b16. No change.