User agent

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Revision as of 13:27, 28 August 2006 by Alice Wyman (talk | contribs) (added Firefox and Mozilla Suite categories)
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This article applies to both Firefox and Mozilla Suite.

User agent string

The user agent string is a piece of text which identifies the name and version of a given browser. It can be accessed by Javascript and numerous other means. It is used by websites to determine which browser you use. Some webmasters do this solely for the purpose of keeping statistics on browser usage. Others will deliberately reject certain browsers based on the user agent string, or redirect them to different version of a page.

To see your own user agent string, copy javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent) into the Location Bar and press Enter. Alternately, go to the "Help" menu and select "About Mozilla Firefox" (or other product name) where the user agent string is displayed at the bottom of the dialog.

If a web site is rejecting access solely based on the user agent string, you may wish to install the User Agent Switcher extension, which allows you to change your user agent string in order to mimic that of other browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. Note that this may cause problems with the Java plugin.

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