New user agent for firefox with help of terminal

Discussion
1

Hi all, :wave:

I wanted to experiment with Bing´s chat AI to see how it performs. As I have gathered some experience with OpenAI´s ChatGPT I thought it might be interesting to take a look at it now. :wink:

After doing a bit of research on the web I found out that the EDGE browser still seems to be needed together with “new Bing”.

On How to access Bing Chat AI on Chrome or Firefox - Pureinfotech I learned that one can alter firefox´s user agent in about:config. But that´s something I don´t want to do.

I´d rather employ the command-line for that matter.

I finally found out that using a new firefox profile and here defining a new user-agent can achieve the same.
So that´s the command I came up with:

firejail --private=[Path-to-special-directory] firefox -P „new-profile“ -no-remote -url „https://www.bing.com/new“ -header „User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/111.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/111.0.100.0„

As an additional bonus firefox runs in a dedicated sandbox. :blush:

It works fine so far and using my Microsoft account I can log into new Bing.

The only thing that doesn´t seem to work is the chat (AI) feature. It seems that firefox still isn´t recognized as the EDGE browser…
… although this should be the case with the above command. :thinking:

Does anybody know why that is :question:

Many thanks and many greetings from Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

2

Hi Rosika,
Not an answer for your query,
but
what are those upper and lower double quotes?
Dont exist on my keyboard? Was that copied from a pdf doc?
Regards
Neville

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3

Maybe a keyboard other than English?

4

Hi Neville, :wave:

thanks a lot for your reply.

In actual fact I didn´t notice those lower double quotes in my post. No idea how they got there… :thinking:
I just looked at my notes (normal text file) from which I copied the commad here and there are just upper double quotes there…

I´ve now idea how and why the conversion was done. Sorry for that. :slightly_frowning_face:
Actually I´ve got no lower double quotes on my keyboard either…

Well, apart from that I finally decided to go down the other path suggested by this source .

  • Open Firefox.
  • Type the following command in the address bar and press Enter: about:config
  • Click the “Accept the Risk and Continue” button.
  • Search for general.useragent.override and click the String option.
  • Click the Plus button.
    Copy and paste the following user agent string to access Bing Chat from Firefox and click the Save button:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/111.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/111.0.100.0

  • After you complete the steps, you can start using the new Bing Chat AI from Mozilla Firefox.

O.K., now it worked. :+1:

I could log into new bing with my old microsoft account and begin a chat.

It was enough for me to do a bit of evaluation, I guess.

There are two points which I don´t like much:

  • Bing´s results seem to be way behind of ChatGPT´s results, quality-wise; at least that´s my impression
  • I got no way of scrolling the chat page. Once the chat got lengthier the upper part was cut and couldn´t be easily accessed any more.
    The only way to get the “lost” results back was to downsize or shrink the page as a whole which renedered the results almost unreadable.
    That said single results can be copied (one at a time).
    Wheter or not that has something to do with the fact that I still use firefox (but with a different user-agent) I cannot say but I doubt it as other pages are still scrollable…

Well, all in all ChatGPT offers better results and is better suited for administrating search results. That´s my personal opinion of course… :blush:

Thanks a lot anyway for your help, Neville.

Many greetings from Rosika. :slightly_smiling_face:

5

Hi Bill, :wave:

thanks for the suggestion.

Curiously enough I don´t actually have lower double quotes available on my keyboard.
It´s a Lenovo Lenovo Black Silk USB Keyboard which came with my PC.

It features a QWERTZ-layout designed for the German language, I think.

Thanks and many greetings

Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

6

Hi Rosika,
That means Discourse is doing it.
That is not good, because if someone copies your command, it will not work.
I will investigate

Regards
Neville

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8

Hi Neville, :wave:

hang on please before you investigate further.

I´m not entirely sure whether Discourse is to blame. :slightly_frowning_face:

I just glanced over my notes and found two contradicting entries.
The first one I got from ChatGPT and this one is definitively correct: Just upper double quotes.

Before posting here and to verify what the chatbot found out I searched on the web and found the same syntax for doing it.
Yet I have to admit it didn´t occur to me to check the double quotes. So I just copied the command from there to itsfoss.

Alas I could not find the original source again, so I cannot verify that one is to blame either.

The only thing I can be sure of is the fact I didn´t do any of the double quote conversions myself :thinking: .

So unless there´s no other incidence of this kind I guess it´s best to leave it at that (for now).

Thanks so much, Neville for your effort.

Many greetings
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

9

Hi Rosika,
Agreed.
I am aware that if I use Latex to make a pdf document, there are problems with the keyboard style ‘straight’ quotes coming out as left and right ‘curly’ quotes. That is a font issue, and can be fixed
So perhaps what you have is a font issue too. Not worth the trouble of trying to track it.
It is not Discourse… I tested it.
Regards
Neville

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10

Hi Neville, :wave:

thanks for your feedback.

O.K., that sounds plausible. Although I have to admit I´ve never had any difficulties with copy-and-paste until now.

Well the main thing is:

Thanks a lot for investigating it. :heart:
It´s good to know there´s no issue here.

Many greetings from Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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11

That’s odd because from what I’ve read the Bing Bot is really just a rebranded and updated ChatGPT. Microsoft has invested billions now in OpenAI.

Using Edge I haven’t seen the problem you had with paging, but it might be that I just haven’t noticed it.

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12

Hint
Remove sunglasses

13

Hi @pdecker, :wave:

thanks for your comments.

Yes, that´s what I was thinking as well.

But there still seems to be some difference between those two.

From https://www.howtogeek.com/882163/chatgpt-vs-bing-chat-ai/#htg=231007 :

ChatGPT and Bing Chat AI are both based on the GPT language model developed by OpenAI, but
they are running different versions, and there are differences in how inputs are
handled.
As of April 2023, Bing uses a testing version of the GPT-4 model, while
ChatGPT is on the older GPT 3.5-turbo model. Both chatbots have customizations built on the
language model, such as different input methods and interface features, and Bing
specifically has integration with applications like Edge and Skype.

Note: ChatGPT and Bing Chat are both changing at a rapid rate, and neither chatbot
provides the same exact answer for a given prompt on each attempt. Your results may vary with the prompts used here.

also:

I found out that the EDGE browser is now available for Linux as well.
I didn´t want to install a dedicated browser just for the chatbot, therefore my attempt to try it with firefox.

But perhaps I´ll give it a try in the future. :blush:

Thanks a lot and many greetings.

Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

14

I use Edge for Linux and really do like it. The one gripe I have is that it used to include text to speech and they removed that over a year ago. It was really good voices too and it’s still available for the Windows, Mac, and Android versions. I have no idea why they removed it.

1 Like
15

Hi @pdecker, :wave:

Yes, I agree. That´s surely something nice to have. :wink:

I use TTS not exactly on a daily basis but several times a week.
I wrote a script for just that task which proved to be very convenient.

The most important thing for me is the fact that it makes use of pico2wave under the hood which provides very human-like output, not robotic at all.
The advantage of a dedicated script is that it´s applicable to anything text-like: browser contents, PDFs, txt files etc.

Many greetings from Rosika. :slightly_smiling_face:

16

Hi all, :wave:

just want to let you know - in case anyone might be interested - that I managed to solve the scrolling issue I encountered in firefox :

This was the issue:

During my research for a solution I stumbled over an add-on for firefox:
Bing Chat for All Browsers …
… which should, as the name suggests, enable Bing chat for firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bing-chat-for-all-browsers/

Note:

This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.

Well, I had no intention of installing this add-on, as I already succeeded in changing the user agent in firefox.

But I also found this hint on the page:

About this extension

https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers

Fix Scrolling Issue: Set layout.css.overflow-overlay.enabled to true in about:config, and update to the latest version of Firefox

So it seems the scrolling issue is not just with me. :blush:

That seemed interesting. So I looked it up and found that layout.css.overflow-overlay.enabled was already set to true. :thinking:

Well I changed the value to false and then back to true again.
I´m pretty sure that didn´t do anything to help me with my problem, but I did it anyway…

But:

In the meantime I had a new version of firefox running (as part of my system updates).
This is the second point they mentioned (“latest version of firefox”).

And now indeed scrolling works. :+1:

Well, that´s sorted then.

As far as (a very incomplete) comparison of ChatGPT and Bing Chat is concerned it seems that Bing Chat is noticably slower in providing some results but on the other hand it gives notice of what it´s doing search-wise, i.e. what search words it´s looking for.
I like that. :smiley:

Plus: it also provides footnotes referring to the answer it comes up with. That´s also a huge plus-point, I think. :smiley:

O.K. that´s all for now.
Many greetings to all of you.

Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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