Knowledge Base

Jitsi Meet is a great piece of self-hosted software. I recently had to update my instance to get the mobile device support back. At various points in its history, it has required the use of Chromium-based web browsers. For a while now though, it has supported Firefox.

Apparently it uses the useragent string to determine which browser you're using, which is quite ordinary. I'm not that interested in Google's attempts to manipulate this on the World Wide Web and use "capabilities" or something else which will need to be spoofed to accomplish what we want with non-Google browsers.

By default, LibreWolf uses its own browser name in the user agent string, so Jitsi Meet will tell you to use Firefox or Chrome. You can set privacy.resistFingerprinting = true but this affects my calendar solution by using UTC timezone and messing up the display of my calendar events. Well, just recently I poked around in about:config and saw a very useful setting:

general.useragent.compatMode.firefox = true

By using true here, you can use the useragent string that solves the Jitsi Meet problem, as well as a few other sites' lack of awareness of LibreWolf as a firefox-based browser. Well, you just ignore their lack of awareness, because they are now only aware of your Firefox browser. I've filed bug reports, but I guess webmasters don't care these days.

I don't mind advertising that I use LibreWolf instead of Firefox. But I do want sites to work, so if the firefox user agent string gets me what I want, then I will use it.