Firefox in an IE costume?

October 12, 2006 1:13 PM

My work intranet autodetects my Firefox browser and forces me to use IE. Is there a plugin that I can get that will make Firefox masquerade as IE, so I can surf my intranet with my favorite browser?
posted by mtstover to technology (7 comments total)

Maybe you can change your userAgent using this?
posted by clearlynuts at 1:16 PM on October 12, 2006

er, this, I meant.
posted by clearlynuts at 1:16 PM on October 12, 2006

From asking my question to surfing my intranet in 3 minutes flat. Thanks Clearlynuts! (Although in fact they've appeared to design the site so it is actually broken on Firefox. Buh.)
posted by mtstover at 1:22 PM on October 12, 2006

Is it because the site uses ActiveX? There's a plugin for that, too. But at that point, you might as well break down and use IE every once in a while.
posted by clearlynuts at 1:43 PM on October 12, 2006

You can use the IE rendering engine within Firefox with ietab. The company I work for has an IE-only Web stats package, and I've been using ietab to get around this for a year now. The extension includes by-site configuration options, so once it's taught to treat your company intranet as an IE site, you don't have to remember to toggle back and forth.
posted by mph at 1:44 PM on October 12, 2006

You don't even need a plug-in to override the useragent string:

1. Enter about:config in the address bar and hit enter
2. Right click anywhere in the window and select New > String
3. Name the string general.useragent.override
4. Make the value any useragent you like, such as IE6's Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
5. Click OK.

To revert to the default, go to about:config again, right-click on general.useragent.override and select Reset. The next time you restart the browser, Firefox will go back to identifying itself properly.
posted by Danelope at 2:23 PM on October 12, 2006

IE-only intranet? I develop my company's intranet and, even though there's virtually no chance of us ever moving away from IE, I make a point of making sure anything new I work on works cross-browser (hopefully this'll mean far less pain when IE7 swings into town).

You can get round non-software-installation rights by downloading a nightly from Mozilla, unzipping it to somewhere like My Documents and running it from the exe. Er, apparently...
posted by TheDonF at 3:22 PM on October 12, 2006