The websites in question are likely using techniques to detect the user agent, which contains information about the web browser and operating system used by the user.

A basic example is the Google search website. It detects the web browser to enable or disable the new Google Instant Search feature. Opera users for instance are not able to use the feature because Google uses browser sniffing to disable the feature for user’s of that browser.

The Google Chrome extension is a basic extension which can detect if a page uses user agent detection. If it is enabled, it displays an icon in the Chrome address form, if not then nothing is displayed. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how it works.

google user agent detection

User agent detection is not only used on sites to offer different contents to different browsers. Many advertising scripts are also using those techniques. That’s why you for instance see the icon on ghacks as well, even though it is used by third parties and not by us.

The extension is probably nothing that users want to have installed all the time in the browser. It is however interesting to see which websites use user agent detection.

Evil Meter can be downloaded from the Chrome extensions gallery. This site is also an example of a site that detects the browser in a different way, considering that it displays an active install button if the page is accessed with the Google browser, and an inactive button if another browser is used.

In this article I am going to show you a few more nifty tips and tricks you can do with good old Konqueror.

Auto scrolling

If you are one that reads a lot of lengthy pages on the web, you will certainly appreciate this feature. While on a web page hit either <Shift>Down Arrow or (for down) or <Shift>Up Arrow (for up). When you do this Konqueror will very slowly auto scroll either up or down (depending upon which arrow you hit), so you can read without having to continually scroll through the page. You can stop this action by hitting <Shift> alone.

Browser identification

How many times have you been to a web site only to see that site “only supports” a certain browser? Although this is getting more and more rare, there are some dinosaurs that refuse to give up the ghost and finally become universal. For those sites you need to be able to switch your user agent string, Konqueror has some pretty spiffy tools for that.

Click on Settings > Configure Konqueror > Browser Identification. In this section you will find the means to configure site specific user ID strings. All you need to do is click New and then, in the new window, fill out the necessary information.

Zooming

With Konqueror you can quickly change the size of the fonts on a web page. To make a font larger hit <Ctrl>+ and to make a font smaller hit <Ctrl>-.

Shortcuts

Konqueror has numerous short cuts that can make your life much easier. To see this entire list click on Settings > Configure Shortcuts which will popup a new window. In this new window you can edit any of the shortcuts to better fit your needs as well as create new shortcut profiles. By creating a new shortcut profile you can retain the default as well as create your own specialty shortcut profile.

Terminal window

Figure 1

Konqueror allows you to have an attached terminal window which can be helpful in a number of ways. One of the most helpful is for website design. If you are working on coding a design, and need to see updates quickly, what better way than to have a terminal “embedded” into your browser (see Figure 1) so you have immediate access to that terminal.

What I do is enable the shortcut for this option (see above) and that way you can quickly toggle the terminal window on. To exit the terminal window, just enter exit and hit Enter.

Final thoughts

Konqueror is one versatile browser. As you can see there are some things this app can do that others can not. Like in the true Linux spirit, if you want Konqueror to do something, most likely you can make it so.

The user agent tells them the program or service that was used to send the email which can help evaluate the validity of the email. It should be noted however that the user agent is not always displayed.

It might raise suspicion for instance if a user has send emails from a specific program in the past while the latest email uses a different service or program.

Thunderbird users who want to add the user agent to the header information in the email software need to perform the following steps:

• Access the Options by clicking on Tools > Options in the header menu of Thunderbird.
• Switch to the Advanced tab and click on Config Editor, accept the warning message.
• Filter for the parameter mailnews.headers.showUserAgent
• Double-click the parameter to set it to true
• A restart might be required before the information are displayed.

The changes can be reverted by performing the same steps again. Do you have Thunderbird tips of your own? Let us hear them in the comments.

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.

Again the User Agent is used as the only mechanism to check if an iPhone connects to the service. If you have already installed the Firefox User Agent switcher add-on and added the iPhone user agent to it you are ready to visit the iPhone start page at Texterity Magazines to read any of the 50 magazines for free in your browser.

If you have not done this visit my first article that explains how you can change the User Agent in Firefox to be identified as an iPhone (Iphone user agent) when browsing the Internet.

Magazines seem to be specialized way more at Texterity. Some titles are The American Lawyer, Electronic Products, Extreme How-To, Greenlight Magazine and Popular Science.

Yes, the same insecure User Agent check that did not work on so many occasions before. All that needs to be done is change the User Agent in your browser to the one of the iPhone which will trick the website into thinking that you are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and Penthouse.

The content is provided in full screen in your browser and you can flip through the pages with a click. It’s probably not the most comfortable way but it’s free and easy enough. Pages are actually shown as images which means they can be saved to the local hard drive.

Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

just add the line into the User Agent field in the options of the add-on and any name in the description. Then switch to that User Agent and visit the Zinio website that was created for iPhone users. Thanks Scott for the tip.