Well, I never could get IEs4Linux to work on Intel Mac. Never could find the right files. My mind was all jumbled up with x11, Darwine, Wine, apt-get, Fink, ./configure, Apple Developer Tools, and dead links.
Stupid solution staring me right in the face the whole time (or should have been staring me in the face!)—Opera! Opera did the trick. The newest version of Opera has not only a user agent switcher but also a user agent masker, which, as far as I can tell, tries to render the site as IE would (not just pretend to the site as if the browser is IE).
I don’t know for certain it’ll work fully with my mother-in-law’s IE-only website, but it looks like it might. We’ll see what happens when she logs in.
Opera, you’ve come a long way, baby.
Edit: Nope. No go. It appears to work but then hangs indefinitely on login. I did a bit more research and found that the site she uses calls on ActiveX. Weird that it works on IEs4Linux on Ubuntu, then.
Back to the drawing board…
Opera has always been on the forefront of browser innovation, features, speed and security. If only they would open the code to the blasted thing, I’d use it. But it’s a beautiful browser. It really is.
Well, as you can see from my edit, Opera didn’t seal the deal.
I agree with you, though, that it’s matured a lot as a browser over the past few years. I’m too familiar with Firefox to switch to Opera, though.
I know this won’t help your mother-in-law, but it’s evident that it’s the webmaster’s fault that the website doesn’t work. Did you at least email the person in charge of the website? (I do that when I find a website that doesn’t work for me, as I think it’s terribly rude for webmasters to ignore 20-30% of the public… while disregarding the security of the other 70% by using ActiveX)
this is an old blog post, but response…
proxomitron log shows that opera’s ua “mask” vs whatever they call the other user-agents differs only in that they add “opera” to the ua.
When set operausb 9.26 to “identify as firefox”, this is actual UA:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061208 Firefox/2.0.0 Opera 9.62
notice also that the firefox version is ancient :-)
also I think i found this at nontroppo or similar opera ini website. so it didn’t come with operausb.
here’s the button:
opera:/button/%22Identify%20as%22=%22Identify%20as,%20,%20,%20,%20%22Window%20Browser%20Icon%22%20%3E%20Identify%20as,%201,%20,%20,%20%22ff_button%22%20%3E%20Identify%20as,%204,%20,%20,%20%22ie_button%22%22
indicating that ua-switching is builtin, but needs a button (or menu ini) to control ua.
Proxomitron also has ua filters plus a few other browser-sniffing blockers. :-)
pederick’s ua switcher for FF appears limited to just ua switching.
i use frequently opera for certain functions. the inis are cumbersome. dnd is very poor for a win app.