>If you long to see what a site that is optimised for mobile will look like but don’t have a mobile device to hand what do you do?
In yesterday’s post I alluded to a couple of tools for switching your user agent so that smart sites that define their behaviour accordingly are fooled. Well it’s probably a good idea to give you a some links to these.
My favourite is a firefox addon called User Agent Switcher by chrispederick – and you can get it at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59/
Safari 5 has an easy built in User agent switcher, to activate you need go into options\preferences – under the advanced tab there is a mysterious check box that says”Show developer menu in menu bar”
Once you’ve ticked this the menu bar will – as indicated – include a “develop” option…. see this image
I rather like the Safari switcher – and if you size the browser you can get quite a realistic looking replica of an iPhone, and because the menu bars auto-hide it’s easy to get good screenshots.
I haven’t yet tried one for chrome – but have found one:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aafciojnlamllgpkpdkbamkfgbofhgcj
I’ll try that tomorrow.
And finally the most pointless one of all is for IE8, which you can get at :
http://www.ieaddons.com/en/details/other/UAPick_UserAgent_Switcher/
I say this one is pointless – because IE8 doesn’t use webkit so from what I found today you get none of the groovy mobile functionality. No transitions, in fact, for me the site under test was not functional.
But then when you try and get IE to pretend to be an iPhone what do you really expect?