Two weeks ago, I blogged about the fact that Netflix was blocking Chrome and Firefox with Fedora user agents although those browsers are now officially supported on Linux. The blogpost got a lot of publicity, almost 5000 hits, and I was even accused of creating clickbaits on reddit 🙂 But it led to the wanted result – solving the issue.
Someone pointed me to Paul Adolph from Netflix. He no longer works in the department which is responsible for user agent filtering, but was very helpful and forwarded the issue to responsible engineers. They never told me why they were blocking Fedora (and it turned out other distributions such as CentOS, Debian, openSUSE too), but promised to fix it within the next couple of weeks. I assume it was just some outdated user agent filter.
I tested it today and it seems to be fixed, both for Chrome and Firefox. And also not only for Fedora, but also for other distributions (I tested CentOS, Debian, and openSUSE). So now you can watch Netflix on Fedora without any user agent tweaking. Just keep in mind that for Firefox you need to install ffmpeg Firefox is using for media playback, Chrome should work out of the box.
I’d like to thank Netflix for resolving the situation pretty quickly.
Brno hat 
Auf Deutsch: “Ein Satz mit X : Das war wohl nix!”
in english : Sorry, your completly wrong. FireFox on Fedora still doesn’t work.
I just checked it :
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Hoppla, da ist etwas schiefgelaufen …
Problem mit der Internetverbindung
Die Wiedergabe ist aufgrund eines Problems mit der Internet- oder Netzwerkverbindung nicht möglich. Bitte überprüfen Sie Ihre Internetverbindung und versuchen Sie es noch einmal.
Falls das Problem weiterhin besteht, rufen Sie bitte den Netflix-Kundensupport unter 0800-724-0963 an.
Fehlercode: F7031-1101
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Are you sure you have ffmpeg installed? Because if your problem was caused by the user agent filtering, you’d be forwarded to a web page with a list of supported browsers. This seems like missing codecs.
Found it: If you have Noscript enabled, make sure you active the domains:
nlfxvideo.net
nlfximg.com
nlfxext.com
netflix.com
the tracking domains are not needed to run it 😉
I have this message “Whoops, something went wrong…
Unexpected Error
There was an unexpected error. Please reload the page and try again.”
I’m sure I have everything needed installed because Netflix used to work when I switched user agent from “fedora” to “eweawe” Now it doesn’t work either way so it’s even worse 😀
Are you sure you have ffmpeg installed?
Awesome news 🙂 Thank you for forcing netflix to support Fedora users 🙂
I never installed any plugins, and it always worked here on my Fedora 25.
(never installed any plugins for netflix do work. But I have some other extensions like lastpass for other things)
Yeah. It works here on fedora25 with firefox52! With chrome it did already. But i will go now with firefox only. Thx.
Yeah, thanks for nothing!/s
Thanks so very much for this!
It’s a great option to have, but if you don’t want to deal with restrictive content you still don’t have to.