TechAirlines: Technology Tips

Ever visited a website that greeted you with a message similar to the following?

"Sorry, you're using an incompatible web browser" shows unless it detects Internet Explorer.

This message checks your User Agent, so to avoid this message, users need to use a different browser, which will have a different user agent. In a previous article, I mentioned how webmasters can test their website in multiple browsers easily. But what if you’re a normal web user and a website you need gives you this message?

Thanks for a Firefox extension known as User Agent Switcher, users can pretend to be a different browser. The current user agent can be set using the option in the Tools menu.

My user agent here is Internet Explorer 8.0

This extension also temporarily changes the user agent shown in the About Firefox window.

User Agent Switcher temporarily changes your user agent. Here, my user agent shows the iPhone 3.0.

Users can easily add their own user agent in the options menu. For example, if a user wishes to pretend to be Google Chrome 4.0.266.0, then just add “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.266.0 Safari/532.6″ to the list of user agents.

This method can trick many websites relying on user agents, including Google Wave which gives an incompatibility notice if a Internet Explorer user agent is detected. In addition, when using a mobile browser user agent, such as iPhone, some sites such as Twitter and Facebook will load their mobile (or iPhone) version by default.

Note that everything will be still be rendered as Firefox would.

User Agent Switcher
Requires Mozilla Firefox, Flock, or another Gecko based browser supporting .xpi extensions