User-Agent Switcher Autor: ntninja

🌈⚧🌈⚧🌈⚧🌈 Easily pose as another browser by changing the User-Agent header.¹ 🌈⚧🌈⚧🌈⚧🌈

Pretending to be a different browser can be useful in a number of different situations:

• Some web pages require you to log in or buy a subscription to view their content, but give full read access to search engines.
• Some web pages determine whether you’re using a mobile or desktop browser based on your user-agent.
• Some web pages require you to use a specific browser to access their site.
• And potentially more…

Note that your browser will not magically morph into a different piece of software just because it’s pretending to be some other software. If a web site locks you out because your browser does not support a feature they require then changing the User-Agent will not make any difference.

¹ Also changes navigator.userAgent, as well generating convincing values for several of the other navigator.* properties.

– Translating “User-Agent Switcher” to a new language
Any help in translating this extension is greatly appreciated! To do so, simply visit our project on the WebLate hosted instance, create an account and either select an existing language or add a new one to get going. Thanks for helping out!

(Alternatively you may submit a merge request on GitLab with the updated translation files or send me the translations using the “Support E-mail”-Address.)

– Getting Help
Found a bug or want a new feature? Please use the GitLab issue tracker (until I get around to switching to Codeberg at least) or write an e-mail to submit these. I am not notified of your message if you just leave a comment on this page.

Please note however that “User-Agent Switcher” is mostly in maintenance-only mode now and new features will not be added by me (the primary author, ntninja anymore. I’m still open for patches from the community however, but might get back to it myself at some point.

– Observing it work
If you want to watch User-Agent Switcher work, there are a few things you could try:

• Use a web service (such as UserAgentString.com) to see your currently sent User-Agent header.
• Use the built-in Network Analyzer (Ctrl-Shift-Q) to view the User-Agent header.
• Enter navigator.userAgent into the Scripting Console (Ctrl-Shift-K) to view the client-side User-Agent value. (Note that the scripting console needs to be unlocked on modern browser versions as some nifty found it makes a great to over unsuspecting people’s accounts…)

– Frequently Asked Questions

• Why doesn’t the extension work on this very site (Mozilla/Firefox Add-ons)?
  To find out more about why these restrictions exist and how disable them if you must, please take a look at the following blog article: https://ntninja.yukis.eu/extensions-modify-mozilla-sites.html
  
  (This information was moved from this extension’s description to an external site, since a Mozilla reviewer felt that suggesting changes like the one proposed in the linked article are not acceptable for the listing of sandboxed browser extension.)
• Why is the extension file so large (4MiB) compared to others?
  In order to provide almost perfect emulation of User-Agent values, User Agent-Switcher bundles a stripped-down version of BrowsCap. This allows us to derive all relevant JavaScript navigator.* browser/OS identification values from just a single value: The User-Agent value you enter (and a bit of magic behind the scenes). Other extensions with a similarly complete level of emulation used to store all these values in huge tables along with the User-Agent value itself, making it very hard to add new entries.
  
  Doing this kind of emulation without using BrowsCap would be extremely hard for us, as there are only few rules regarding the structure of User-Agent strings and the most interesting part end up in the extremely browser-specific comment section of the string. As such, we consider these extra 3MiB+ of data shipped with the extension a fair price to pay for having almost perfect out-of-the-box emulation of all these values with no extra user configuration required.
  
  Replacing BrowsCap is a long-term goal however since the used BrowsCap-JSON library has been archived years ago and hence its predictive accuracy for modern User-Agent strings is somewhat reduced (although it still keeps up pretty well all things considered!), perhaps a future replacement will be more lightweight but it is not clear at this point unfortunately.
  
  In any case, bundling browser information data is here to stay and if you cannot cope with the extra size this causes please kindly download a different extension and don’t down-vote this one for your disdain. Other people appreciate this decision even if you don’t.
• Why is there 🌈⚧🌈⚧🌈⚧🌈? Isn’t that woke? What does that have to do with an extension?
  Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that publicly being anything other than Cis Hetero Male results in a certain type of low-quality “fanmail” of some people apparently feeling entitled enough to both demand I fix their problems and telling me all the wrong decisions I must have apparently messed up in my life (read: they are Transphobic/-misic and feel they deserve my free labour for it).
  
  While this probably won’t shut them up, it might at least sully their day a bit. 😉
  
  (Next time you see weird pride flags somewhere: It probably started as something along those lines. You’re welcome for the explanation, btw.)