Explorer, Safari, Opera and Firefox. There’s no shortage to the amount of browsers available today, but if you’re using a Mac you’re likely running Apple’s Safari and with good reason. Just celebrating it’s fourth release, Safari is the first – and only – browser in the world to receive a score of 100% on the web standards Acid 3 test for compatibility. Which means for websites complying to web standards there is no other browser that will be more compatible than Safari. But, what about sites that don’t comply to the standards? That play by their own rules and may even block certain browsers to view their pages? For situations such as this, Safari is actually able to view these pages by disguising it’s appearance, or “user agent”, to view these sites correctly.
The user agent is what a browsers present to a website so that compatibility with it’s pages can be verified. In 1993 the first browser to display images inline with text was released. It was called Mosaic and was soon followed by a competitor named Mozilla (a play on the word Mosaic killer). The problem that this caused for websites was that Mozilla had a new feature called frames, a way for websites to display multiple panels on the same page. Mosaic didn’t have this feature and for this reason websites needed the ability to differentiate between which browsers would be presented with the “framed” version and the “non-framed” version. The agreed solution was that they would communicate to the websites their identity. This information is called the browsers user agent.
Every website has access to this user agent information that communicates which browser you are using along with other information such as wether you are using a PC, Mac or mobile platform. Because of this, when a website is designed it can be decided by the creators that if they only want to support certain browsers to view their page they can disallow all others. This is not standard for most websites however there are some, often governmental or business related, which may only support a select few. If this is the case and Safari is not allowed to view the page, the following steps can often be executed to allow Safari to adopt the user agent of a compatible browser.
In Safari the first step to alter the user agent is done by enabling Safari’s develop menu. This can be done by selecting, from the menu bar, “Safari -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Show Develop menu in menu bar”.
After this is done you will notice in Safari there is a menu bar title called “develop” and from there we can select “Develop -> User Agent” and receive many alternate choices for Safari’s user agent.
As a demonstration of how user agent blocking can cause a problem let’s take a look at the log-in page of the Clearing House On-line Reporting Application (C.O.R.A), a service that enables small schools to participate in basic clearinghouse services. Without changing the user agent in Safari if we go to the link https://cora.nslc.org/cora/Home/login.asp and attempt to login we will be greeting with the following error.
What this is telling us is that because we are not using a supported web browser, which in this situation is Internet Explorer, the site is disallowing us from proceeding to the log-in page. This can be fixed by choosing a compatible user agent for this site under “Develop -> User Agent” and selecting “Internet Explorer 8.0”. After we have done this Safari will now report to all sites that it browses too that it is actually running Internet Explorer and if we try the link again we will be greeted with the correct log-in page.
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