Websites think I have older version of Safari?

[mrcap]

Hi guys, I have been using safari forever on my iMac. I am running the latest versions of OSX and all my software is the latest version. I get an error while browsing some websites including iCloud saying that I do not have the latest version of Safari and sometimes I am restricted from using the site. Like my old Hotmail account forces me to use their mobile version on my iMac.

This has been persistent for several months now and I never have found a resolution to the issue. i did read something that implied that my version history may be incorrect but no advice as to how to fix it. Is there some way to change my Safari version info that is broadcasted when I browse?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Consultant]

What is the exact error message?
What Safari and OS version are you running?

 

[mrcap]

Using All Latest versions of software.

I am using the latest versions of all software making Safari 7.0.1. There is no specific error as I it happens on many different websites with different messages but the gist is always; you are not using the latest version of Safari.

example below

iCloud.com: Unsupported Browser
You can use your current browser, but iCloud works best with the latest version of Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The message is always similar. I run the same browser and version of Safari and OSX on my MacBook Pro with no issues on all the same sites.

 

[mrcap]

No Solutions?

I have seen this same issue in many threads but none of the questions have any solutions. Does someone know what the version info is broadcasted from?

 

[velocityg4]

Have you tried resetting Safari?

 

[Nermal]

I'm not at my Mac right now so don't have the exact wording, but there's a menu item to the effect of Develop > User Agent. What is that set to?

If the Develop menu doesn't appear then you can turn it on in Preferences.

 

[mrcap]

Bad user agent string

To the best of my knowledge after further research, it appears that I have an incorrect user agent string, and therefor have to update the user agent string using Terminal.

Still looking for more specific instructions.

Thanks Nermal for getting me headed in the right direction.

 

[mrcap]

There is a fix

After further digging I found a solution that worked easily. It does turn out that for some reason (that part I did not research) i had an incorrect "user agent string". Correcting this may be done by editing the user agent string. you can do this by editing the related plist with a ASCI/Hex conversion and back.

This was more than I really wanted to do but I found a simple way to edit the string using MacPilot which allows you to edit the string using normal text. I did it using their trial version by clicking on Safari in the app and updating the custom user agent string. This is the string I used and Safari now works like it should:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9) AppleWebKit/537.71 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Safari/537.71

Thank you for your help and suggestions that got me going in the right direction!