Using Kindle (Silk) to access eBay

[penguins_dont_fly]

Good Morning all.

This is a small but irritating thing.

I know the eBay app for Kindle has been deprecated....but I am having issues when accessing ebay.com through the native Silk browser on my Kindle.

All attempts to access "My eBay" and any submenus keeps trying to redirect me to m.ebay.com and erroring out with the "it's us not you" page or with "this device is not supported".

Even If I select "classic site", clicking links to my eBay still redirects to m.ebay and fails 😞

I can eventually get to where I need to go (like messages) ... but it is a serious pain in the youknow.

Is there any way to stop eBay from redirecting to m.ebay when using a browser?

[penguins_dont_fly]

Just wanted to add ...

I'm an experienced user (and stubborn to boot), so I know to try workarounds and alternate paths to get where I need to go.

But buyers who aren't as bullheaded as myself would probably give up. 🙂

[dollybeauty]

@penguins_dont_fly 

I do not know how to get your native Silk browser to work for you. I do not have a Kindle to play with.

However, if you would like to try, see the link below to install FireFox on your Kindle.

I can not even guarantee that the FireFox version for your Kindle will not have the same issues as your present Silk browser. However, there is a FireFox guru, who may be able to help should you get the FireFox browser installed.

See this link for directions to install FireFox, on your Kindle...https://www.technipages.com/kindle-fire-silk-browser-alternatives

[berserkerplanet]

>>Is there any way to stop eBay from redirecting to m.ebay when using a browser?

In general no. Might be possible if software you are using allows spoofing user agents or specifying user agent to be used assuming that that is the only method eBay is using to determine that the device is unsupported (even though the device actually works fine with eBay)

Same issue using my Windows 10 mobile phone with Opera Mini browser - half of the functions on eBay.com (like searching, viewing, buying) fail with the "mobile site no longer supported" error even though the browser is in full desktop mode and the pages mostly work fine when I manually manipulate URLS or come at them from a different starting point. All just sloppy programming on eBay's part.

The problem is that Opera Mini has no capability to specify user agent like Opera Mobile did on my old Win6 phone. Edge on the phone is a trainwreck, so I just don't buy anything on eBay when on my phone (that's right eBay - I go to Amazon instead where things work 🙂

I'm pretty sure simple user agent spoofing will work since I can spoof my Firefox 3.6.24 desktop browser as an iPhone, iPad, or Opera Mini browser and get the same "device no longer supported" errors. That tells me they are probably just using the browser transmitted user agent, and are not using deeper diving device profiling script approaches.

(I use multiple addons in my desktop Firefox browsers to manually choose user agents for specific sites or automatically for some. For example, one of the the eBay label management pages results in an eBay logo, header, and footer with the rest of the page blank in FF31. Manually spoof it to be FF52, reload the page, and it works fine. I have to do that manually because the automatic addon only does full domains, not subdomains or only certain pages, and I don't want to use a FF52 US for the entire eBay domain. I prefer the Yahoo Mail mobile interface for managing email in Firefox 3.6.24, so I automatically spoof FF3.6.24 to be Opera Mini for that entire domain - that works because I only access Yahoo Mail pages in that particular browser. I used to have to spoof FF3.6.24 to be IE 6 to get eBay checkout to work, and as Opera Mini for these forums too until I moved those tasks into this FF31 browser)

If the Kindle Silk browser has detailed configuration options that let you specify the user agent to be presented, you could figure out a desktop UA that works by trial and error (https://developers.whatismybrowser.com/useragents/explore/software_name/ ). Problem with that is that in most setups that becomes your user agent. To go elsewhere with the normal Silk UA, you'd have to change the settings again.

[penguins_dont_fly]

@dollybeauty  @berserkerplanet 

Thanks guys.

I will give FF a whirl and report back in after I've had time to mess with it.

I have tried Chrome ... but not FireFox.

Chrome was a disaster. I loaded the Google Play APK and then Chrome.  I ended up having to factory reset the Kindle because Google Play Store and Amazon App Store do not play well together. I couldn't ever get Google to update properly and some of my apps kept updating first from AAS and then GPS in a never ending  loop (this version! No! This version!) ... and the processes that Google runs ate up all of the RAM and the Kindle would just lock up.

 I will poke at it this afternoon or tomorrow 🙂 I had 8 large boxes of new inventory arrive yesterday afternoon and they are creating a fire hazard in my hallway. I need to get that sorted first LOL

[berserkerplanet]

If you try Firefox and it still fails over to the mobile site, you should be able to manually change the UA in it without addons using the internal settings in about:config (assuming that about:config functionality is available in the Kindle compatible ver of FF, and that the UA settings are there)

To force for instance, my Windows desktop version of Firefox 3.6.24 to present as Firefox 59
"general.useragent.override"
needs to be set to
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0"
(no quotes on either)

To change it back to default, set that setting to nothing.


There also is/was a provision to use site specific UAs specified in FF by setting the "general.useragent.site_specific_overrides" setting to "true", and then defining individual UA settings of the form:
"general.useragent.override.ebay.com" and assigning the user agent strings to those to be used for specific sites without having to manually change the "general.useragent.override" setting all the time.

Discussions indicate that feature was removed a long time back, and I never bothered to test things out to see if it worked in older versions and/or when it quit working (since I use the User Agent Switcher and UAControl addons), but who knows, maybe they built it back into the Kindle Firefox.

Let us know what you come up with.

[penguins_dont_fly]

OK Guys ...

I just decided that I had had enough listing for the day LOL

I followed the link that dolly gave to download FF ...

The first thing that happened was that Silk wouldn't even let me open the download links on the page.  It just opened and immediately closed a tab and would not download.

… unless I was using "Private Tabs" …. then It let me download 🙂

I installed the latest version on that page.

I logged into ebay

I tapped My eBay > Messages

And … no error.  All of the "My eBay"  submenus work without having to tweak FF at all.

It looks like eBay is just seeing the Kindle as a generic Android device when using FF.  Which means something in the Silk browser is what eBay doesn't like (Probably the word "Amazon" LOL)

I'll mess with it some more over the next couple of days … look through OCS, maybe try to buy something.  Basically break-testing 🙂

So … I can't wait to add some add-ons like an AdBlocker - which is not supported at all in Silk.