No microphone setting at Duolingo with PM

[gracious1]

I frequently use the site Duolingo for language practice.
I have noticed that when I use Pale Moon, Duolingo cannot detect that I have a microphone, and the Microphone settings do not appear on the Settings page.

In contrast, I used Chromium, and lo and behold the microphone settings appeared.

I am not sure if this is a bug or if I need to adjust a browser pref, or what.

To test this yourself, I believe you will have to create an account at Duolingo. (It's free.)

PM 27.8.2 (64-bit)
Chromium 65.0.3325.181
Ubuntu 14.04.5

UPDATE: Also tried it with Seamonkey 2.49.2 and got no microphone, and with Brave 0.22.13 and did get the microphone.

[Nigaikaze]

From what Duolingo itself says:

1. Check that you are using Google Chrome. Microphone exercises only work on Chrome.

[gracious1]

From what Duolingo itself says:

1. Check that you are using Google Chrome. Microphone exercises only work on Chrome.

Well, that's strange. I'm sure I used to use it with different browsers before.
Thanks, anyway.

[Walter Dnes]

When all else fails, lie to the website about your user agent...

• Go to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent with Chrome and leave the window open. The Chrome user agent string will be in the blue box near the top.
• In Pale Moon goto about:config and create a text entry general.useragent.override.duolingo.com
• For the value of the text string copy the entire string in the blue box in the Chrome window
• Try the website again, and let us know if it helps

[Moonraker]

When all else fails, lie to the website about your user agent...

• Go to https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent with Chrome and leave the window open. The Chrome user agent string will be in the blue box near the top.
• In Pale Moon goto about:config and create a text entry general.useragent.override.duolingo.com
• For the value of the text string copy the entire string in the blue box in the Chrome window
• Try the website again, and let us know if it helps

Walter why go through all that if the OP has chrome installed anyway.?
just use chrome for that specific website.

[Walter Dnes]

Walter why go through all that if the OP has chrome installed anyway.?
just use chrome for that specific website.

Maybe because he really would rather not be running Chrome and having Google track him. And the answer might also help people who don't have Chrome.

Some web designers are absolute idiots when it comes to user agent sniffing. I don't know if you can get cbc.ca videos outsite of Canada, but here's an example. Try URL http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/telcos-rate-hikes-1.3410425 and play the video with default settings. Either the page doesn't show up at all, or else the audio is very low-pitched. But if I set up a new string in about:config

NAME general.useragent.override.cbc.ca
VALUE Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0

...the video plays just fine. And I don't want to be switching back and forth to Firefox/Chrome all the time. Actually, I don't have Firefox or Chrome. On Gentoo Linux, "www-client/chromium" is "unstable" and "www-client/google-chrome" is "missing keyword", which is even less tested than "unstable".

[eskaton]

Is there any way to confirm if this functionality requires WebRTC, because if it does then it will not work in Pale Moon full stop.

[gracious1]

When all else fails, lie to the website about your user agent...
... let us know if it helps[/list]

Walter why go through all that if the OP has chrome installed anyway.?

Moonraker, that is a good point, and I have used Chromium elsewhere when nothing else worked. But of course, I would like to avoid using Chromium except when it is absolutely necessary.

So Walter, I tried your suggestion, but changing the user agent had no effect. So I guess Duolingo is doing proper feature detection?? But which feature is missing, I don't know. (For all I know, it could be WebRTC as eskaton023 suggested.)

FYI, the microphone setting appeared in both Chromium and Brave, as I mentioned before, but it did not appear in Opera, nor in any Gecko/Goanna browsers (SeaMonkey, PM, Waterfox, Fx ESR, etc.)