Making FireFox on Linux look like Windows (or anything else)

September 11, 2008 by William Bryant
Filed under: Uncategorized 

I LOVE my new installation of openSUSE 11, but as usual with me hopping back to Linux, there’s a few tweaks that need to take place in order for me to be 100% non-windows dependent and happy with my install.

One MAJOR thing that’s been bugging me is the fact that my online banking website DEMANDS that my browser be FireFox or IE on Windows or Mac, not linux. These guys are idiots. Yes, I have Internet Explorer on Linux, but I don’t want to use that.

After thinking for a while, and remembering that you can masquerade your browser to look like something else in Konqueror, I thought I’d try to do it in Firefox. I don’t use KDE, I’m a GNOME lover, so I don’t want to use Konqueror either. I want to use Firefox, and luckily it’s very configurable indeed to solve this problem.

Remember about:config command? Well, there’s a quick and easy way using about:config to mask your browser identification into whatever you want it to be. Great for any website that thinks it’s better than Firefox and demands you use something else!

Type in about:config in your browser bar, hit enter, and in the appearing window right click and hit New> String. Let the preference name be “general.useragent.override”, and the value be whatever you want it to be. Some examples are:

Googlebot/2.X (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
The Google Web crawler.
Mozilla/3.0 (Win95; I)
Netscape Navigator 3.0 on Windows 95.
Mozilla/3.01 (Macintosh; PPC)
Netscape Navigator 3.01 on a Macintosh.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; AOL 4.0; Windows 98)
The AOL browser, based on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01, on Windows 98.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 2000.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/2.2.2; Linux 2.4.14-xfs; X11; i686)
Konqueror 2.2.2 for Linux.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010726 Netscape6/6.1
Netscape 6.1 on Windows 98.
Opera/6.x (Windows NT 4.0; U) [de]
The German version of Opera 6.x on Windows NT.
Opera/7.x (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]
The English version of Opera 7.x on Windows XP.

And that’s it! Normally to see changes you have to restart the browser, but in this case I didn’t have to; I loaded up my online banking website and was up and rolling.

Thanks to this website for the help: http://www.ericgiguere.com/articles/masquerading-your-browser.html

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