The Firefox web browser has been my browser of choice for years. With thousands of add-on and plug-ins its infinitely customisable and with version 4.0 coming soon (here’s the beta), the Mozilla team are constantly working on improvements. There are several Spotify-related add-ons, search plug-ins and bookmarketlets. Here’s a full run-down!
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Spotify Web Player Hotkeys Firefox Extension. This extension adds keyboard shortcuts to Firefox to play, pause, next and previous tracks in Spotify Web Player. Unofficial spotify plugin for Kodi, (for now) not yet available in the official Kodi repo. Based on the opensource Librespot client. Special thanks to mherger for building the special spotty. With Spotify, it’s easy to find the right music for every moment – on your phone, your computer, your tablet and more. There are millions of tracks on Spotify.So whether you’re working out, partying or relaxing, the right music is always at your fingertips. In Firefox, if the about:config flag 'media.autoplay.enabled' is set to false then the spotify webplayer will NEVER work. This flag is important to stop nasty web sites that bombard users with videos or ad-videos the user has no control over. Please allow the web player to work correctly with this flag set to false. TuneMobie Spotify Music Converter can download Spotify songs, albums and playlists to computer, convert Spotify music to MP3, M4A, WAV or FLAC, help you enjoy best offline listening experience of Spotify music with free or premium account. Additional Firefox addon cache spotify.
Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.
Add-Ons Available from Mozilla.org
The original Spotify plug-in for Firefox, with this add-on you can select any text on a webpage then right-click to search for the selected artist, album, or track in Spotify.
This search add-on lets you type in an artist, track etc. into the Firefox search area then returns a webpage with results from Spotify. The webpage apes the Spotify client and lists track titles, artist, duration, and Spotify popularity. Songs are ordered by popularity; click the track, artist or album to open in Spotify.
Supposed to display the name of the artist, song or album of the links displayed on the page. I couldn’t work out how to get this working though: I installed it then checked various webpages containing Spotify links (both HTTP and URI variety) but didn’t see any difference. Please let me know in the comments if you get this one working!
A continuously evolving project from Dr. Sounds, FireSpot previously analyzed webpages for songs then flagged each track with a small green clickable Spotify-like logo. The plug-in was then revamped to provide a playlist-generation tool: when viewing a webpage, click the FireSpot icon in the Firefox status bar to auto-generate a new playlist in Spotify with any tracks identified on the current webpage. It seems though that this post-processing plugin (weighing in at a rather hefty 3.1 MB) may have fallen foul of Spotify’s terms & conditions and is currently rather flaky (the author advises to “please remove Fire Spot at this time.“) It’s a great idea though and one I will be checking out again in the future.
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Other Add-Ons & Scripts
FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser. Supports many music services, including Spotify.
Adds a Spotibot playlist generator search to your browser’s list of search engines. Type in an artist name to the Firefox search box to generate a custom playlist of related-artist tracks:
This excellent browser bookmarklet lets you select song tracks on a webpage then generate a Spotify playlist via the Playlistify site. I find it extremely useful, although you do need to go through several steps to register the playlist before you can listen to the songs. Here’s Playlistify maestro Roeland to tell you how it works:
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Other Tools
For a list of other URL decoding bookmarklets, see the Spotify URL Tools page.
If you know of any other Firefox-related apps, plug-ins or bookmarklets please let us know in the comments!
Update September 2020: While these exact instructions don’t work anymore, there are solutions in the comments.So please read the comments as well until I found the time to test new ways and to update the post.
A friend of mine asked me if it was possible to use the Spotify Web Player on his Android smartphone.
If you are like me and don’t use Spotify on mobile very often, you might not know that the free version of the Spotify app is heavily castrated. I’m not using it a lot, but if I understood correctly, you can’t properly play a playlist or one song, you get force fed “matching” songs. Also you can’t constantly skip songs. To push their Premium Account to you, Spotify additionally prevents mobile browsers from using their less limited Web player.
While I understand that Spotify wants to earn money, I heavily dislike the artificial limitations to push people to a paying account. If you can’t sell your Premium Account with a feature list, you should probably work on the list instead of artificially limiting the features on different devices. Especially the differentiation between PC and mobile browsers triggered me. Therefore I welcomed the challenge of convincing Spotifys Web player to work on Android.
The Spotify Web Player uses EME(Encrypted Media Extensions), so we’ll need a Browser supporting these. I used Firefox Nightly, as I’m already using Firefox on all my devices anyways and I strongly dislike Chrome.
As Spotify seems to check the phone resolution, we need to configure Firefox to return an accepted resolution.
- Enter
about:configinto a tabs URL window - Search for
layout.css.devPixelsPerPx - Change it from
-1.0to a positive value,1is a good starter
You can experiment with this value, for my OnePlus 3T and my friends Samsung Galaxy S6, setting it to 2 worked well.
This will change how web sites will be scaled, so don’t be surprised if everything is very small now.
Sadly, using Firefox Nightly with the changed scaling settings is not sufficient. We need to use two additional Firefox Addons: User-Agent Switcher and Manager and uBlock Origin.
Spotify Kodi Addon
Changing the User-Agent
Spotify Web also checks your User-Agent string. As your browser “admits” it’s running on an Android device, you will still be redirected to the “Download the App, hurr durr!”-site. Therefore we need to change the User-Agent string Firefox sends to Spotify.
- Install the already mentioned User-Agent Switcher and Manager Addon in Firefox Nightly
- Select “User-Agent Switcher and Manager” from the 3-dot menu
- Select a nice User-Agent from the list. I chose a recent Firefox Version (Firefox 63.0) with Windows 7, just because it’s most likely one of the most used User-Agents.
- Don’t forget to press “Apply”.
uBlock Origin
In theory this should suffice to let you use Spotifys Web Player. But I had a lot of Firefox crashes while testing, this setup. Adding a block rule to uBlock Origin seemed to fix that.
- Download the uBlock Origin Addon
- Go into its configuration (Addons -> uBlock Origin -> Options)
- Go to “My filters”
- Add
||www.spotify.com/*$document,domain=www.spotify.comin the list
After all those configurations, I was able to successfully use the Spotify Web Player from my OnePlus 3T Android device. My friend was able to use it from his Galaxy S6 as well.
If you don’t hear any sound, don’t forget to check your current playback device (the PC icon in the lower right corner).
Wow Spotify Addon
This could work on iOS as well, but I have neither tested it nor do I have any interest in doing so.
