Saturday, September 19, 2009

Browser ID String - User Agent

Links:
User Agent Switcher

Superficial entry here. I'm a Yahoo! Premium User but, even if I weren't, I believe I'm supposed to have access to their News videos. I don't, using Firefox, currently version 3. I sent them an email some months back and they assured me that their videos are tested and viewable on Firefox. Um... no. Or maybe "yes" on some version on some system they created. Anyway, eventually I had little choice but to pursue the annoyance of a User Agent spoofer.

USER AGENT SWITCHER ("UAS")
I went ahead with the popular User-Agent Switcher developed by Chris Pederick. It installs easily and then ones simply restarts Firefox.

ADDITIONAL INFO
This is a good piece of software, but doesn't have the three or four strings I wanted to use. I wanted to save the large file that comes with UAS, but also to make my own short list so that I would only need to select from three options, and the menu would therefore be much smaller and more useful.

1) Backed up the ID files that came with UAS. This is in

/home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/[random].default/useragentswitcher/useragents.xml

I backed it up: $ cp useragents.xml useragents.bak, and then opened the original useragents.xml file and added the strings I wanted from various GIS's. The one which allowed me to view content in Yahoo was:

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