10.4: Spoof old PowerPC Firefox with Universal version

Apr 19, '06 07:18:00AM

Contributed by: knutsen

Tiger only hintThe official Universal build of Firefox was released in mid-April. You have to get it explicitly -- Firefox's "Check for Updates" feature will only find updates for the PowerPC version.

I've found that some sites don't like the word Intel in the useragent string. In my case, address completion in Yahoo! Mail wouldn't work. Here's a quick workaround: FinD your current useragent string by visiting this page. Scroll down, then highlight and copy the text in the box below the words This is your browser useragent string. Mine looked like this (broken onto two lines for display purposes):

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2)
 Gecko/20060328 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Now type about:config in Firefox's location bar. Control-click in the browser window, and select New -> String from the pop-up menu. For the preference name, type this:
general.useragent.override
For the string value, paste in the text you copied above, then change the Intel to PPC.

That's it! You can visit and refresh the above page to see if it changed. At some future date, you can reset this config entry, or change the PPC back to Intel to test if your favorite sites have become more well-behaved.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2006041410012863