It’s 2009 and I would have thought the world wide web would be browser agnostic by now. Unfortunately there are some developers that simply can not design or code for a cross platform/browser world. Because of that developers have had to create browser add on’s to help get around the issues.
Many of you have most likely heard of the Firefox add on called User Agent Switcher. What this add on does is trick web sites into thinking your Firefox browser is something it isn’t. You can even user this add on to trick the web site into thinking you are on a different operating system.
The only problem with this add on is that the included profiles are somewhat limited to: Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista,? Netscape 4.8 on Windows Vista, and Opera 9.25 on Windows Vista. This doesn’t help the Linux user all that much. The typical Linux user will need more than that. There are times you are going to need to either see a site on a different OS/Browser combo for developing purposes or switch to a different browser just to actually access a site. Fortunately the developers of User Agent Switcher made it possible to import profiles. Let’s take a look to see how this is done in Linux.
Navigate through the menu
The first thing you need to do is install user agent switcher. This is such a simple task that most of you will know how to acheive this goal. Once the add on is installed (and Firefox is restarted) click on the Tools menu to reveal the new menu entry for the User Agent Switcher.
Click on the Options entry to open up the window that will allow you to import profiles. In the new window click on the User Agents “tab” to open up the section that allows you to handle the imports.
Add profiles here
From the new window (see the image to the right) click on the Import button (but do NOT click the Overwrite button or you’ll lose the current profiles) to import new profiles.
Once you click that button a browse window will open for you to find the profiles to import. The next question is where do you get profiles? The best profile list I have been able to find is here. Once you have the file located on your hard drive click the Import button, locate the file, and click Open.
Now when you look at the listing of possible user agents you will see around 50 possible selections to use.
Final Thoughts
I am always surprised when I come across a site (when using Linux) that will not allow me to enter (or use some of their features). The fact that I have to install an add on to allow my browser user a web site rubs me the wrong way. Rubbed or not, it is a good thing these add ons are available for die hard Linux fans. Otherwise, without User Agent Switcher, we’d be dual booting or, even worse, admitting defeat. And we all know that, for Linux users, defeat is not an option.
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Whenever I encounter one of these stupid sites, I just leave them. I figure if they’re too stupid to hire a real programmer, they’ll be too stupid to be of any real use to me also.
And again Jack a ferry useful “happy easter” artikel.
Which sites ‘block’ Firefox still? List some URLs, I’ll visit the sites and write to the webmasters.
Well, Google won’t let you install Google Gears on ‘Shiretoko’, which is what Firefox 3.5b4 is called on Kubuntu 9.04. Why Shiretoko? No idea.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090401 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5b4pre
Is there any way to have different user agents for different sites?
Thanks for the link to the xml file.
@WTF. My bank, for one
Sweet, I think now i have every User Agent, and i’m currently running Firefox4.0b2, which by the way is awesome If you want it, you can download it from my blog http://theweavernews.blogspot.com,. Oh and yes User Agent Switcher 0.7.2 works like a charm, with FF4.0b2 so i can switch between all sorts of different Agents, and this has proven to be very useful as at some work places, they are blocking browsers, by app name, or even platform, and even cache type, yes IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, all have different cache…