Pale Moon forum

I have been using a "user agent override" (via Sasuga 2.1.1) to view Instagram posts on my laptop for months without any problems. After updating to the latest Pale Moon (29.2.0) I am now unable to see anything except text descriptions of images, including those previously uploaded to my own account. Obviously my "user agent override" is no longer working....so how do I get it back? Is Sasuga another one of the FF-related extensions no longer supported by Pale Moon? If so, are there any user agent switching programs that are Pale Moon approved? I am not using the user agent feature for any purpose other than accessing Instagram on my computer instead of my phone which I rarely use for anything other than making emergency calls on; nothing nefarious, I just don't like trying to view images on a tiny phone screen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Sasuga is a native PM extension built from scratch, so no. UA overrides are always iffy given how quickly site developers keep dicking around with their layout and code. Search the forum for other threads about overrides for Instagram, maybe something there might help.

It is still supported - Sasuga.

Not a user myself, so hopefully someone else will point you in the right direction.

Falna wrote: ↑

2021-04-28, 16:02

It is still supported - Sasuga.

Not a user myself, so hopefully someone else will point you in the right direction.

I mean that Sasuga was made from scratch for Pale Moon and is not a port from Firefox, so there is no question of it being disabled by this update.

Try to remove the override.
I don't know what you are missing as I do not use the service, but you might want to try it out without the override and see if it works.
As a side note, if you are using something which "spoofs the referer", try disabling that feature while browsing the site and see if it makes any difference.

I do not have any problem with viewing Instagram posts without any user agent override present at all. Instagram like to put a banner at the bottom of the screen to say the web browser is no longer supported but I ignore that.

Sasuga (which I admit I don't use) is according to a description only a nicer user interface to the options that you can natively access by entering "about:config" into the address bar.

I suppose there could be an issue with something previously cached, so you could try clearing the Pale Moon web cache to see if that helps (Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network)

if it's of any worth, I have the same issue with Pale Moon 29.1.1. and 29.2.0, but without any extensions or user agent overrides. it did work fine up until a week ago or so though. tried clearing cache, logging out etc. to no effect.

the curious thing is, even though the images are not displayed, they are being requested and loaded, as evidenced in the developer tools/network thingie.

So as is very often the case the browser is blamed for a server-side change.

I fixed this by setting both Origin and Referer headers to "https://www.instagram.com" for Instagram requests.

Moonchild wrote: ↑

2021-05-01, 21:20

So as is very often the case the browser is blamed for a server-side change.

yes.
it was never my intention to blame the browser, I was just wondering if someone would find a workaround that would fix what Instagram broke.

pintassilgo wrote: ↑

2021-05-02, 04:51

I fixed this by setting both Origin and Referer headers to "https://www.instagram.com" for Instagram requests.

setting them where exactly, care to elaborate? thank you

You need (supposing that what fixed the issue for me is an universal solution) something to modify request headers. Then you need to set the headers as I said in my previous comment.

I don't know if there's an available extension to modify requests, but there's autoconfig.js. Open your Pale Moon folder, navigate to \defaults\pref, create a file named config-prefs.js with this content: Then navigate back to Pale Moon folder, create a file autoconfig.js with the following code:
Notice the // in the first line because the first line of autoconfig must not contain code. Then restart Pale Moon.

The snippet of code changes requests to "cdninstagram.com", not instagram.com itself.
It's likely it simply doesn't like a UA override on one but not the other.

Also check if you are spoofing referrers with the available preferences in the browser and if so, stop doing that. It is known to cause issues.

If there really is a problem with requests between instagram.com and cdninstagram.com not having the proper referrers or origins then that is almost certainly a redirection or name aliasing issue which should not be "worked around" with slow on-the-fly header rewriting but rather reported to instagram -- likely our browser isn't the only one suffering from this issue but on the server side this might be seen as "catching bad bot requests", which would be false positives. It's in their own interest to fix this in that case.

This is not a bug, appears to be intended. Instagram blocked images from loading when Referrer is not from its own website. Those of us who use a different config for Referer (like not sending Referer at all) will get this error even while browsing Instagram. For normal users (with default Referer settings) this is only an issue when an image from IG is directly embedded in another site.

thanks pintassilgo