Change your browser’s User Agent string to view iPad ready websites

A growing number of sites are offering iPad ready versions of their web content. To accommodate the smaller screen size and make navigation simpler with the fingers, a new type of user interface the likes of which we’ve never really seen before is making its first appearances. Not to mention, these websites have to strip their Flash content, which to me isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Gmail's new iPad interface

When you access a site, your browser identifies itself with its User Agent string. This string includes information like the browser name, its version, your operating system and the type of device you are using in the case of a mobile device. With this information, a website can easily show different versions of its content to different User Agents. By changing our User Agent string (also refereed to as spoofing), we can trick those websites into thinking we are visiting them on an iPad.

Here’s how to change your user agent in Firefox and Safari

Safari

1. Go in Safari’s preferences, switch to the advanced tab and activate the Developper menu (Show Develop menu in menu bar).
2. From the now visible “Develop” menu, select User Agent > Other.
3. Copy and pate the following line of text into the dialog box.

   Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

To revert back to Safari’s default User Agent, go to Develop > User Agent > Default (Automatically Chosen).

Firefox

1. Download and install the User Agent Switcher Firefox extension
2. Once installed, go to Tools -> Default User Agent -> Edit user agent
3. Click New -> New User agent, then create your iPad user agent.Copy and paste the following line of text into the User Agent field. Add a description and fill in the other fields if you like but know that they are not required.

   Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

You can change your User Agent in nearly every browser. Check out Life Hacker’s tip on spoofing your User Agent in Chrome.

Note: iPad specific websites are designed for mobile devices are aren’t officially supported on desktop browsers. That said, Webkit-based browsers like Chrome or Safari will perform much better.

Apple has a growing list of iPad ready websites.

[Source: Life Hacker]