Life as a Firefox user can be quite difficulty on today's Internet. While it depends largely on the sites you visit in the browser, you may run into "not supported" messages or locked down services. Often, these services or websites are not locked because they do not work in Firefox, but because the developers implement browser sniffing technologies.
They test Chrome compatibility and allow only Chrome or Chromium-based browsers, even if Firefox would display the site just fine as well.
Granted, some sites may not work in Firefox because the browser does not support a specific API or feature, but that is actually very rare in the grander scheme of things.
Firefox users may overcome some of the limitations by faking to be Chrome. This is done usually by changing the browser's user agent. This piece of information reveals information such as the browser engine to the website. By claiming to be Chrome, Firefox would not be blocked from accessing a particular website or service most of the time.
We reviewed several user-agent changers for Firefox in the past. To name just a few: Custom UserAgent String, Chameleon, or UserAgent Switcher.
Chrome Mask
Chrome Mask is an open source extension for Firefox that changes the user agent on the user's request only. Doing so requires a single click. The extension sets the latest Chrome user agent string automatically and picks the right operating system as well. While that gives you less control over the user agent, it is a convenient option that should work in most cases without any issues.
Last but not least, the extension will shim "a few additional JavaScript attributes" to better pass as the Chrome web browser when sites perform additional browser checks.
To use Chrome Mask, all you need to do is click on the extension icon and then on the toggle that it displays. This enables or disables the user agent spoofing on the active website, depending on the previous state.
Who is the extension for? Firefox users who run into issues loading certain sites on the Internet. A click should give access, provided that Firefox supports all the features that the site uses. This is often the case when a site developer does not test against Firefox and prefers to block the entire browser because of this.
Now You: which browser do you use at the moment? Did you run into any compatibility issues using it lately? What did you do?
Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post Chrome Mask: Make Firefox appear as Chrome with a single click appeared first on gHacks Technology News.
0 Commentaires