If you’re like most people, you use Internet Explorer 8 to browse the web. But if you want to take advantage of some of the newer features in IE8, like the new tab page or enhanced security features, you’ll need to change your user agent string. Here’s how:

  1. Open Internet Explorer 8 and click on the gear icon in the top right corner.
  2. In the “Internet Options” window, click on the “Advanced” tab.
  3. Under “User Agent String,” type in a new user agent string that reflects your desired browser behavior. For example, if you want to use IE8’s new tab page feature, type in “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.”
  4. Click on “OK” to save your changes and close the “Internet Options” window. ..

A User Agent String identifies your browser and system details to sites you go to. It will identify your browser, version number, and details about your system. This allows a web server to use the information to provide content specific to your browser. If you want to change the value of the data being sent, using the UAPick User-Agent Switcher will do the job in IE 8.

Installing UAPick User-Agent Switcher

We chose to install UAPick User-Agent Switcher from the IE Add-ons gallery but it can also be installed/downloaded from the homepage (link provided below).

Click on Run when the appropriate window appears.

You will need to confirm the installation once the temporary installation file has downloaded.

The default install location will be in the Program Files area.

Once the installation has finished you will see a message about where to find the switch command and that it will be available the next time you start Internet Explorer.

UAPick User-Agent Switcher in Action

Before changing the user agent string on our browser we did a quick I.D. check to verify our settings.

To change the user agent string go to the tools menu and select the Set UA String listing.

Note: The user agent string will automatically switch back to the original default each time you restart Internet Explorer.

A new temporary window will open with details for the current string visible.

Open the drop-down menu and select the desired user agent string.

For our first example we chose “Konqueror, Debian”. Click on the save button when you are finished.

You will be presented with a new window showing the details for the new user agent string.

Refreshing our browser displayed a successful switch.

For our second and final example we chose the “Netscape 3, Win 95” listing. Another success…

Conclusion

Whether out of necessity or just for fun UAPick User-Agent Switcher provides you with a nice assortment of user agent strings to use while browsing.

Links

Add UAPick User-Agent Switcher to Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8 Add-ons Gallery)

Add UAPick User-Agent Switcher to Internet Explorer 8 (UAPick Homepage)

Learn More About User-Agent Strings