Many websites offer specific interfaces for smartphones, iPads, and
other mobile devices. Whether you need to test mobile websites or you’re
just curious to see what they look like, you can access them in your
desktop browser.
You can do this by changing your browser’s user agent — we’ve previously explained
what a browser user agent is.
Accessing a website with an iPad user agent may also force it to serve
you HTML5 video, which is nice if you’re trying to avoid Flash.
User Agent Switcher Extensions
We have covered
how to change your browser’s user agent without installing any other software.
However, for ease-of-use, you will probably want to install a browser
extension that lets you quickly and easily change your browser’s user
agent.
You will want to install either
User-Agent Switcher for Chrome or
User Agent Switcher for Firefox, depending on which browser you use. For Internet Explorer, you may want to try the
UAPick User-Agent Switcher add-on.
Setting a Mobile User Agent
To change your user agent, locate the User Agent Switcher extension
icon on your browser’s toolbar, click it, and select a mobile user agent
in the list.
(You may need to add the User Agent Switcher icon to Firefox’s
toolbar after installing it. To do so, right-click the toolbar, select
Customize, and drag and drop the User Agent Switcher icon onto Firefox’s
toolbar.)
When you’re done, select the Default User Agent option.
The process is similar in other extensions. Even if you are using your
browser’s built-in user agent switcher, it should be a fairly simple
process.
Additional User Agents
Some user agent switchers don’t come with a comprehensive list of
user agents. For example, the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox
doesn’t include an option that allows you to set your user agent to an
iPad’s.
You can download additional user agents by clicking the User Agent Switcher icon and selecting Edit User Agents. Click the
Download lists of user agents to import link and you will be able to download and import a more comprehensive list of user agents.
If you would rather enter a user agent string manually, you can find them on websites like the
Mobile Browser ID (User-Agent) Strings website.
For example, the user agent for an iPad with Safari and iOS 6 is:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A403 Safari/8536.25
Changing your user agent can also be used for other purposes. For
example, you could set your browser’s user agent to Googlebot and bypass
the occasional newspaper paywall or use an Internet Explorer-only
website without being redirected. Thankfully, IE-only websites aren’t
very common anymore.
