Re: [K12OSN] Can not access science web site. Can firefox masquerade as another browser?

[Ben Mabbott <bmabbott riverdale k12 or us>]

Rob Owens wrote:

> what exactly does "switching the user agent of the
> browser" do?  I just tried installing this extension
> and used it to visit an IE-only site, but no joy. 
> Does this extension simply report to the website that
> the browser is IE, or does it actually implement some
> IE-only functionality?
>  
Right, all it does is report to the server that your browser is IE, it 
doesn't provide any IE functionality like ActiveX. This was useful in 
the days when there were lots of sites that would not display unless 
your browser was IE or Netscape, presumably because webmasters wanted to 
standardize and not worry about whether other browsers would format 
their pages properly. If the server could be tricked into thinking the 
browser was IE, it would work just fine.

These days it's pretty rare to run into sites like that, but it still 
happens once in a while. Unfortunately, in their place have come sites 
that really do have code only IE can process.

-Ben