Firefox User Agent Switcher
User Agent Switcher is a very handy add-on for Firefox, especially if you use Linux and have to deal with websites that don’t like Linux.
One of the issues with it though is by default, it only comes with a few Internet Explorer agents, a few search robot agents and one to emulate an iPhone.
I’ve found that emulating a Mac is very useful in some situations. For example, my bank will let you use a scanner to deposit checks online but if I login using Linux, I’ll just get a “Your system doesn’t meet the minimum requirements” message. If I emulate Windows/IE, their system wants to use my scanner directly and that just doesn’t work. However, if I emulate a Mac running Safari, they’ll allow me to upload a previously scanned picture of the checks. The only problem is User Agent Switcher doesn’t have a Mac profile but this can be easily fixed.
First, you’ll need to copy/paste this into a file with a .xml extension.
<useragent description=”Safari 531.21.10 (OS X 10_6_2 Intel)”
useragent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us)
AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10″
appcodename=”" appname=”" appversion=”" platform=”" vendor=”"
vendorsub=”"/>
Then you’ll need to Import the User Agent which is pretty simple. In Firefox, go to Tools -> Default User Agent -> Edit User Agents… Then click on Import in the window that pops up, select your .xml file and after restarting Firefox, your new User Agent should be there.
