Making Mozilla use IE's user-agent string (Re: [Techtalk] Recruiting :^))

[Akkana Peck]

TechChiq writes:
> In Mozilla, I poked around for awhile and couldn't find a place where I
> could change this type of thing. Maybe someone else could help (I would
> be interested myself for Mozilla).

http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html (sorry to be plugging
my own document, but I hope it can be a good source for information
like this) says:

// Override the default user-agent string:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0; hi, Mom) Gecko/20020604");

(substitute whatever string you want, of course.)

I haven't tried this in a while, but it used to work.  
If it no longer does, please file a mozilla bug. :-)

You can use about:config to change prefs in a running mozilla, but
this pref doesn't seem to be set by default, and about:config won't
let you add a new pref, so it may not be that useful unless you set
override to be the standard mozilla string then change it when you
need to.  

If you change userAgent a lot, installing an extension that does
that may be a better solution.  There are several different extensions
which offer this -- maybe try searching mozdev.org for useragent, or
googling for something like "mozilla useragent extension"?
(Sorry, I have no personal experience with them.  I'm lucky
enough not to need to access any sites that require IE.)

I'd suggest that people please not override their browsers to pretend
to be IE all the time -- I know it's easier, but the more people who
do that, the more the published stats will prove that "everybody uses
IE, so we don't need to design pages that work in other browsers."  
Please only override when you really need to, for all our sakes ...

	...Akkana