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I want to use TurboTax online to do my Income Tax but apparently Ubuntu (or any other flavor of Linux) is not supported. Is there any way around this? I have Chrome and Firefox but both get the "Not Supported" page at TurboTax website.

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I've read people saying they can use it after they click through the warning messages, is that working for you? –  Stefano Palazzo Jan 25 '11 at 1:41
No, a page comes up with a list of supported operating systems/browsers. Only Windows and Mac are listed with the most popular web browsers. –  tufkab Jan 25 '11 at 1:46

9 Answers 9

up vote 9 down vote accepted

One of the people from TurboTax said in response to a Linux user:

[...]you can try the link below to bypass TurboTax's system requirement checks. We can't make any guarantees that you won't run into problems though.


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That works, Thanks. –  tufkab Jan 25 '11 at 1:59
This doesn't seem to work for me anymore. –  isaaclw Mar 5 '13 at 0:57
@isaaclw As of 2013 they seemed to have got more obnoxious about it. See user130547's answer below. –  Kazark Mar 16 '13 at 22:50

Trick turbo tax into thinking you're on Windows 7 64 bit with IE9:


Check out the last section called "Mozilla Firefox"

1 Navigate to about:config

2 Accept the warning

3 Create a new string called "general.useragent.override"

4 Set the value to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/5.0)"

5 Close out of firefox and revisit turbotax

6 Log in and finish taxes

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I've had to do similar with other websites. –  Argusvision Feb 12 '13 at 19:14
Restarting firefox is actually required (even though it seemed like I shouldn't have to). –  isaaclw Mar 18 '13 at 15:11

If that doesn't work out for you TaxAct.com does work with Linux and has comparable features to TurboTax.

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Why would a Web-Application not support an Operating System? AFAIK, if something is not supported, then it is the browser (and generally, only one Browser is mentioned in that context). What I could think of is:

  1. Those people are simply biased towards Linux and block any access from it.
  2. They are using a plugin or special software that is only supported by Windows or Mac and therefor block access from Linux (I doubt it)

In any case, you should get a User-Agent-Switcher. With that little plugin, you can fake your Browser and/or Operating System so that the website does not know that you are running Linux. It is kind of sad that people have to resort to those methods.

A firefox agent switcher can be obtained here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/developers

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I installed Wine in Ubuntu:

sudo aptitude install wine

Then download firefox for windows and install under wine.

Next download and install flash 9 or 10 for windows under wine.

Now open the wine version of firefox and turbo tax online will think you are using windows - works every time.

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If it really isn't platform specific (doesn't use IE specific Javascript or Active X), you can install the User Agent Switcher addon in Firefox and fool the website into thinking you are on another platform.

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  1. Get Chrome (I'm running Chromium 9.0.597.107 (75357) Ubuntu 10.10).
  2. Download the User Agent Switcher Extension and install it.
  3. A new button appears on the top right. Click it and select Internet Explorer 8.
  4. Go to TurboTax and sign in. Everything works for me.
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For Firefox I found the following:

  1. Go to about:config and search for useragent.
  2. Verify that you don't already have a general.useragent.override key.
  3. Create one as a string. Put the following in:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; rv:16.0.1) Gecko/20121011 Firefox/16.0.1

    In place of Firefox/16.0.1 put your firefox version in (in case it 19.0.2)

  4. Restart Firefox.

That'll at least let you log in to the site. It worked great.

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I used TurboTax via Chromium on Ubuntu 12.04 this year for the first time and I did not experience any issues. The Department of the Treasury saw fit to pocket my refund this year, but I'm fairly certain that had nothing to do with my OS or choice of browser and more to do with falling behind on old student loans.

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