Safari pretends to be IE?

[stoid]

The student portions of my universities web site say that they require IE or Navigator. It is a real pain to have to switch out of Safari just to access the site (plus IE is fugly). I thought that I had read that there was a way that Safari could pretend to be another browser. I searched the history, but couldn't find anything. Is this a feature of Safari, or was that just a part of the beta or something? Thanks for the help!

[FattyMembrane]

you can enable this through the hidden "debug" menu. i forget the exact command, but you can do it with a single string in the terminal, or using one of the many safari add-on apps. search www.macosxhints.com with the words "safari debug" and you'll find it.

[Codemonkey]

Yep, that's the way to do it... on principle though, I must point out that this is a Bad Thing. As a Web Designer who subscribes to only standards-based practices, it pains me to see browser detections that are in fact poorly made. Sites that lock out Safari browsers usually do so unintentionally because of poorly written code.

So when we go around going "that's OK, I'll just spoof it into thinking I'm using IE", that doesn't solve the problem. A message to the webmaster as well as to a stakeholder should get their code fixed very quickly, and definitely is the more progressive solution.

Anyway, you were given the answer, and you're welcome to pass that on of course. I'm not going to hold a gun to your head about it, just something to think about.

[fraeone]

Yeah this is good advice. If all the Safari users start spoofing IE all the idiotic websites that check for IE first will continue to do so.

You can also facilitate some new awareness if you also avoid IE when you must use a Windows machine. Mozilla Firebird is vastly superior to IE and also will help send the same message to webmasters: IE SUCKS!

:)