Yet more Firefox goodness
September 10th, 2004 - 11:15am - No Comments »
This is now the eighth time I have posted about Firefox, since I love it so much (I proposed but there are so many suitors I may have to get in line for my answer).
The newest toy I have installed on Firefox is the User Agent Switcher. What is the User Agent for? It’s a small line of text that the web browser reports to a web server so it knows who’s reading. Some sites appear differently depending on the browser reported. Normally I wouldn’t bother with such a thing.
Completely different topic now (and they will link shortly). Some sites, such as the New York Times and now even The Age require you to sign up for a free registration to read their articles. Since I’m lazy, I just usually browse elsewhere instead of signing up to read the article in question.
Here’s where the topics link, and things start becoming enjoyable and worthwhile. These sites don’t require the Google bot (the process which scans websites for the Google archives) to login, so it can scan their site. Hopefully you’ve seen the connection now. Using the User Agent Switcher, I specified a User Agent with the string (which reports back to web servers, remember?) Googlebot/2.1.
Of course, I had to test it right away. I went to The Age website, and opened (but didn’t bother reading) the number of articles you can read before it asks you to sign in (two or three). Switching to the Google User Agent, I was allowed into the article. Going back out, switching back to the default (Mozilla Firefox) User Agent, then back in I was prompted to login.
Fantastic!
