Some user agents for your spoofing needs

Whether you like lying about your browser, or if you just sometimes have to because some mis-designed website won’t let you in with the browser of your choice, there’s always a little issue when spoofing the user agent: finding a good replacement one. It isn’t exactly difficult, and it doesn’t exactly take long but it’s still a boring step. So here are some good ones:

Opera

Opera 10.70 nightly on Windows 7:
Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.6.37 Version/10.70

Opera 11 beta 1 on Windows 7:
Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.7.39 Version/11.00

Opera 11 final on Windows 7:
Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.00

Firefox

Some Firefox 4.0b8pre on Windows 7 x64:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/4.0b8pre

Some Firefox 4.0b9pre 64 bits on Windows 7 x64:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:2.0b9pre) Gecko/20101222 Firefox/4.0b9pre

Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3

Firefox 3.6.12 on Windows 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12

Internet Explorer

MSIE 9 beta on Windows 7 x64:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)

Safari

Safari 5.0.3 on Windows 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4

How to change the user agent

Last be not least, a brief reminder of how to change the user agent:

In Firefox

Go to about:config, and edit the setting general.useragent.override (you might need to create it). If you plan to change your user agent often, you’ll want to user the User Agent Switcher extension. It’s quite a basic extension so should be compatible with the latest version of Firefox even though its description hasn’t been updated yet (at the moment it’s marked compatible with Fx 1.0-3.6 but works perfectly in Fx 4.0b9pre).

In Iron

In Iron’s root folder (same folder where iron.exe is), create a text file named UA.ini and containing the user agent string. (NB: you need to restart Iron for this setting to be applied)

In Opera

Opera voluntarily restricted what you can change in the user agent. All you can do is choose between pretending to be Firefox or MSIE, and as of Opera 11 in both cases the word “Opera” won’t be removed from the UA string: this is what I get:

• “Spoofing” Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 Opera 11.00
• “Spoofing” MSIE: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; en) Opera 11.00

Kind of an epic fail. To pick one of those (assuming you find that of any interest), go to about:config and search for “agent”. The setting to edit is Spoof UserAgent ID. For Firefox (Fx 3.5.6) set it to 2, for MSIE (MSIE 8) to 3. The help says you can spoof without mentioning Opera using values 4 and 5, as of version 11.00 those settings don’t work (they’re equivalent to 3).

In Safari, MSIE, Chrome

As far as I know it’s not possible (well, that is unless you install a local proxy just to spoof the UA, of course, or maybe also a service like Proxify can change the user agent but I’m not 100% sure), so even if Opera’s UA option is limited it’s still better than half of the big browsers out there…

Update (2011-02-16): lots more UAs

I just came across this site which seems kind of dedicated to user agents. I guess you’ll find whatever specific thing you might need there: http://user-agent-string.info/list-of-ua