Using Firefox With Your Computer to Access iPhone Sites
Update: This tip is used in the popular "Playboy and Penthouse Free On Your iPhone" article originally broken by iSmashPhone - and stolen by many others :)
The Issue: With a few steps you'll be able to turn your computer's Mozilla Firefox into an iPhone browser. This is similar to our post on turning your computer's Safari browser into an iPhone browser.
Why? To access iPhone only websites with your Firefox browser in order to preview them, or to obtain data from iPhone mobile-web targeted sites.
The Lesson:
1. Open your Mozilla Firefox browser
2. In the URL bar, enter "about:config"
3. Right click anywhere on the page, go down to New and over to String
4. You will be prompted to enter the preference name. Enter: general.useragent.override
5. You will next be prompted to enter a "string value". Enter: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)
6. Once you have hit OK, you have morphed your Firefox into an iPhone mobile browser! Woo!
Here is a sample of what Google now looks like:
Associated Press has made an iPhone only website: www.apnews.com
Without this configuration you would not have been able to access this page.
To reverse this process and return to regular Firefox mode, you must go back into "about:config".
Then scroll down to the "general.useragent.override" and right click it. Select Reset.
Your back to regular Firefox.
What says the...
Geek: Feed..me..more..browser..hacks!
Socialite: This will make me look smart.
Soccer Mom: Huh?
Call me a nerd or whatever but listen - i love these little hacks - keep em comin!
Posted by: Big Ron | May 06, 2008 at 04:29 PM
Im kinda a noob to Firefox..i just started getting into all those cool add-ons..this is definitely pretty sick.
Posted by: Jason | May 06, 2008 at 04:31 PM
Works great in Mozilla SeaMonkey as well.
Posted by: Bob | May 27, 2008 at 09:11 AM
Could you put together an .xml file that a user could import into User Agent Switcher that has all this data in it? Then users wouldn't have to go back an reset original data, and then re-enter this info to get back to the iphone-only sites.
Posted by: Ron | May 27, 2008 at 12:53 PM
Ron - try out this new add on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
Posted by: iSmashPhone | May 27, 2008 at 01:16 PM
This site has the iphone user agent split into the categories required by user agent switcher firefox add on linked above.
http://paininthetech.com/2007/10/03/fake-iphone-user-agent/
Posted by: azmodie | May 27, 2008 at 06:55 PM
where does user agent switcher come in?
Posted by: bob | May 27, 2008 at 10:15 PM
Hi all, I figured out how to get this to work with the User Agent Switcher app.
1. Once you have that installed, go to Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options.
2. Click the User Agents button, then Add.
3. Fill out the fields as
Description: iPhone
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)
Click Ok & now you can easily flip back & forth between the default & iPhone options. Hope this helps
Posted by: Jill | May 28, 2008 at 10:43 AM
anyone know how to do this with pocket internet explorer in winmo6?
Posted by: Stephen | May 29, 2008 at 10:23 AM
you are great
good work man
Posted by: ajeeb | May 31, 2008 at 07:40 AM
I followed your instructions and it worked just fine, my problem is the user agent string continues to reactivate after I 'reset' it. I tried hitting the delete key on the string but it won't remove it, how can I permanently remove this string from my about:config? Any help would be very much appreciated, thanks!
Posted by: Dmcman | June 04, 2008 at 08:51 PM