You may need to quickly switch between user-agent strings on the fly - when developing websites that need to work on both mobile browsers and desktop browsers user-agent switcing is a must-have.

And some times you’ll expirence some archaic site blocking you because you’re not using Netscape or Internet Explorer (in an ancient version e.g. version 6).

Chrome got a built-in user-agent switcher. All you need to do is to open the developer tools panel (use Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut) and click the wrench button (lower right corner) and click Overrides, and enable override user agent and elect the browser or device you want to emulate and reload the page.

There is user-agent switchers and methods available for most browsers:

Chrome

  • Built-in user-agent switcher
  • Using the --user-agent command line argument

Safari

Firefox

  • Manipulate browser and OS identification in Firefox using ´about:config´

Internet Explorer

You can always check your current user agent string by visting e.g. https://www.whatismybrowser.com/

My current user agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.63 Safari/537.31