I rarely use Safari to browse the web. I’m a Firefox fan. There is just something to be said for software that will run on any machine I sit down at, OS X, Ubuntu, Solaris, Windows, etc.
That being said I recently came across a website that required Safari for OS X users. This was annoying, but I fired up Safari and browsed back to the page. Then I got an error message telling me I needed to be on at least Safari 2 to view the page. This was obviously a case of the web master not staying up to date, as I was running Safari 3. I was pretty disappointed about this as the page is doing live video streaming of 3 upcoming WVU basketball games that are on the road and will not be on TV.
Fast forward to this evening. My co-worker told me I could download an application that would enable a debug menu in Safari that would let me change my user agent string. I thought this was a cool idea, but didn’t really want to install an app if I didn’t have to. So I started doing some research on how I could accomplish the same thing. My guess was that it was just a system preference that I would need to set in the terminal. The app was probably doing this in the background, transparent to the user.
I was right. I turns out this hack was discovered back in 2003.
Here is what you need to do to get your debug menu in Safari.
- If Safari is running close it. Make sure you quit the application, not just close the window.
- Open the terminal.
- type:
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
- Open Safari again
- Enjoy your new menu
If you want to take the menu out, do the same steps, except change step 3 from a 1 to a 0.
Sure enough after enabling this menu, I was able to change my user agent string. The website thought I was on Safari 2, and the content loaded as it should. Looks like I’ll be able to watch the Mountaineers after all.
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