How to get specific websites to always open in desktop mode on mobile firefox!

Wolf_Lbh · January 6, 2018

So sometimes mobile versions of websites are really handy and do things like add useful features or make the best use of the limited display space of phones, but other times, like with youtube for example, they completely screw over the layout of the site and leave out useful features (viewing youtube subscriptions for example only fits a few per page when the desktop view fits 4 per row in landscape mode or 4x6 in portrait mode, and most egregious of all the youtube html5 player is missing the playback speed adjustment option in the not only the mobile view but also the youtube app (last I checked)).

The only solutions I saw were either to individually set a web page to open in desktop mode every time it loads which sucks and requires loading the page twice before you can use it and doesn't transfer to new tabs you open, or to do some hack that would make every website open in desktop mode which isn't ideal because sometimes mobile mode is better.

Anyways here is the solution:
In the address bar of mobile firefox type in:

about:config

Hit enter/go and then press the plus button in the upper left to create a new entry, in the name field type:

general.useragent.override.[site_address]

If you want to change youtube for example type:

general.useragent.override.youtube.com

Then click "Boolean" and change it to "String", and where it says "Enter a string" type in a current firefox desktop user agent id like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0

Now whenever you connect to the website you typed it will tell it that you are connecting from Firefox version 54.0 from Windows NT 6.1 and display the page in desktop mode.

Bam. Only works on the sites you tell it to and it only loads the page once. I found this extremely useful so I thought I would share.