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Friday, February 22, 2013

Change Opera Desktop's UserAgent to Any Mobile Browser's!

Opera is my primary browser on my Windows XP, and I carry Opera@USB over several machines along with my bookmarks, notes and other stuffs. There is no problem.

But as I find myself in slow network; and I have to stick to slower 2G network I find that mobile websites load faster. Actually on my Opera's Speed Dial there are mobile facebook and mobile twitter, while my bookmark includes mobile gmail.

The URLs are:
Mobile Facebook: m.facebook.com
Twitter Mobile: mobile.twitter.com
GMail Mobile: m.gmail.com -> reloads to another page, but opens up mobile Gmail.

Now I find that Opera can load these pages easily but as Opera is not everyone's favorite, the UI of these pages are old-aged.

You can change the user agent string on Opera desktop and get the refreshed UI of GMail Mobile or Facebook Mobile.

Just open up: opera:config#UserPrefs|CustomUser-Agent
and put up your favorite mobile browser's user agent.
Don't forget to scroll down and save your settings. Unfortunately you can not save multiple user agents at a time.

How to get the user agent text to insert there?
I got messed up, and Google became my best friend once again! I found this page: http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Browserlist/ Good collection but there is long list but no details about mobile browsers. :(

Now I find there is website called: http://whatsmyuseragent.com/
Open it with your favorite mobile browser and check out the user agent.


Safari on iPad:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405
as found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent)

Opera Desktop:
Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.12

Google Chrome on Lava IRIS 501:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; IRIS_501 Build/LAVAIRIS501)
AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19

UCBrowser on Lava IRIS 501:
JUC (Linux; U; 4.0.4; zh-cn; IRIS_501; 480*800)
UCWEB7.9.0.94/139/444

You can use this useragents, but I think it would be better if you use the useragents from your device.

My personal favorite:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.2; Nexus 7 Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19

Why Should You Do This?
1. You are on slow internet - dial up, CDMA 1x or GSM/GPRS/EDGE network.
2. You like to use mobile websites of facebook, twitter, Gmail for faster connectivity, while you are on slow internet
3. You don't like the outdated UI of these websites as it is shown on Opera browser on desktop, and like to get modern UI on the same Opera desktop.

Update: Not very much successful

1. Gmail is showing cool UI, but can not open any mail :(
2. Facebook is cool, but the images are loaded too big - framing the whole display (on my 15.6'' laptop).

Overall: FAILED PROJECT !!

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