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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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.

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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.

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