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User Agent Switcher: Oh The (hack-ish) Possibilities! |
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Tuesday, 10 April 2007 |
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.
- One money saving use is to use the Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista) agent at a tmobile wi-fi hotspot. If you do this, your account will get 3 free months of wi-fi access. (thank you to i-hacked).
- Another use is to use the MegaUpload user agent when downloading a file from Megaupload. Megaupload thinks that you are actually using Internet Explorer and are downloading a file using their Alexa spyware toolbar. Nope. You fool them, and win in the end, defeating the country download limit.
- If you want to see how some sites freak out when you surf as Googlebot or Slurp!, you can. They usually throw interesting 404 errors when you go to an area that is "restricted" according to the robots.txt file. (Thanks Tony!)
- Should you need or want to see a site's mobile phone version, you can! Just spoof yourself as a blackberry, or other internet-enabled portable, and you should be given a shrunken version of that site.
- Too poor or too cheap to own a Wii? You can see the sites for the Nintindo Wii by using the Wii user agent at the bottom of the list you just imported. After selecting it, try viewing the Wii Main Page or Surf the Wii Manual. You can see this site for more information about this subject.
- Finally, for you pranksters, you could freak your friends out by hitting their sites hard spoofing as a spambot. This will freak them out and make them think they are more popular online than they really are, because you know you are doing well content-wise when the spambots start copying and scraping your content.
If you want to test any of the user agents to see if they are displaying to the webservers, try this site, as it was designed to show you.
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!
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