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