Safari 3 in Mac OS X Leopard has exposed a crop of bad web developers who use browser sniffing to de-activate features or in some case the whole site.
Browser sniffing is essentially used by developers in order to not have to support a browser. This all started back in the day when IE and Netscape ruled the web and inconsistencies between them forced some developers to instruct users to use a different browser, or upgrade to the latest version.
Not only does this mean turning away users, but it also means potentially turning away supported browsers in the future. If developers are unable to code for all browsers the best method to use is functionality detecting. Rather than excluding browsers on their user agent string, you exclude them based on little functionality tests (find out more via Jeremy Keith's book).
I recently upgraded to the latest version of Mac OSX, which also upgrades my browser to Safari 3. Safari 3 is great and offers lots of nice new features, but it also, quite rightly has a different user agent. So I popped along to NatWest to do some online banking, only to find my browser is no longer supported!
This isn't the case, Apple haven't made Safari less secure! I could switch to Firefox but I tend to install third party plug-ins which means I trust it less which theoretically leaves me stuck. Well this isn't so, you can very easily change the user agent of Safari (something Opera used to do by default back in the day) in order to bypass NatWest's jobsworth of a browser checker.
How to change your user agent on Safari:
- Open the application Terminal
- Copy and paste the following into the Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
- Close terminal and restart Safari
- Now select Debug at the top (to the right of Help)
- Select User agent (second one down)
- Then select Safari 2.0.4 or another browser of your choice
- Now navigate to your badly programmed website of choice.
Other sites that wrongly sniff for Safari: Love Film and RBS.