Messing with my user agent

How easy is it to completly change it?

[j4mes]

In order to keep as many people as possible happy, I have been implementing a variety of scripts to redirect different browsers to suitable parts of my site(s).

I do this using a user-agent sniffer, and test using the relevent browser.

What would make my life an awful lot easier, however, would be if there were some simple means of changing my user agent within the same browser, as there is only so much space on my machine for all these browsers to go.

Through fiddling with the registry, I can get as far as

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Nintendo 64; Windows 98; RAM Expansion Pack)

sort of thing (IE6), but no further. Opera does a few neat user-agent changes, but nothing really very useful.

Can anyone recommend a programme capable of complete UA spoofing, or is this too much hassle to bother with?

Thanks.

[Alternative Future]

Hi j4mes,

Check your sticky mail there is another option!

HTH,

-George

[tombola]

Check your sticky mail there is another option!

... this is a forum, George.

[bird]

This is a menu item in my browser.

Get a copy of Mozilla/Firefox, and install the "User Agent Switcher" extension. Then you can configure a bunch of different agent strings, and switch between them at any time you like.

[DrDoc]

a programme capable of complete UA spoofing

Perl LWP :)

[Alternative Future]

>>... this is a forum, George.

Didn't want to post a URL tombola...

-George

[SlowMove]

AFAIK, you can spoof any user agent with Lynx. I think a lot of sneaky spidering is done with it.

[BinaryFragger]

AFAIK, you can spoof any user agent with Lynx.

K-Meleon (a Mozilla-based browser for Windows) has a 'make your own UA string' feature:
K-Meleon [kmeleon.sourceforge.net]

[SlowMove]

There's more than one way to do it. I've got a port of Lynx running on windows and it's very fast.

[edit_g]

Lynx just doesn't do it for me - I like to have something more visual.

The tool that Bird mentioned earlier is good.

[operafan]

Use Multizilla - change the browser string to whatever you want, if you are on a Win based PC, real easy to change it - has lots of function on it too... as mentioned by Bird- it's bu Mozilla dev.

[nalin]

good old fashion 'wget' can be passed a user agent ('-U agentname' flag I believe) and will fetch pages locally so that you can view them in you browser of choice