| User Agent Switcher: Oh The (hack-ish) Possibilities! |
| Tuesday, 10 April 2007 | |
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Note: This article is for Firefox users only. If you use Internet Explorer, you must click the button at the top of the page that says "Get Firefox With Google Toolbar." Download and install, then proceed below after installing the "User Agent Switcher" extension. This article is really an assortment of techniques and ideas assimilated together over time from articles I have read. Some of them, though are my original, and some are merely modified versions of other people's ideas. Whatever the case, the "User Agent Switcher" extension for Firefox is really cool. I know that it made it to a popular computing magazine's top 10 bad extensions list, but I don't care, considering they put greasemonkey on that list too. User agent switcher is an extension for Firefox that allows you to change what information your browser provides to the sites you surf on about itself. For instance, the default Firefox agent information is the following: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (Compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Anyway, we can use user agent switcher to impersonate other browsers. Internet Explorer only video sites? No problem! Want to surf using a blackberry phone's agent to see wireless versions of sites? Easy! I recently found a site that provided me with a large list of user agents, built into an importable XML file (right click - save target as),which you can get here. After installing user agent switcher (if you use Firefox, I assume you know how to do this), and then go to the tools menu -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options, and click the import button. Select the XML file, and click open. Now, exit the options menu, and go to the tools -> User Agent Switcher menu again. You have a ton of neat user agents to use! If one you are looking for isn't in that list, see the site linked to with the banner below. It has a large amount of other user agents you may be able to use. 
Other than that, I know you as a community can come up with some much more interesting uses. If you come up with any worth telling, let me know at admin@mattparnell.com . Have phun! |
