Nice Firefox Add-On for Mobile Website Testing

I'm working on a website which will render differently depending on whether or not it's being accessed from an iPhone web broswer. I came across this Firefox Add-On which is perfect for some of my testing.

It's called User Agent Switcher and it's written by Chris Pederick.

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

This add-on allows you to change the User Agent field in your browser HTTP requests. In the case of the Firefox browser I'm currently using on my macbook, here is the User Agent field:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10 GTB5

For my testing, I want to change this field to what it would be if I was browsing from my iPhone. This is the User Agent field my iPhone is currently using:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/7A300g Safari/525.20

The User Agent Switcher allows you to create new User Agent profiles and adds a pull-down button on Firefox so you can easily switch back and forth between browser types.

Once you've added your profile and enabled it, an easy test is to simply go to google.com since it should render a simple page for mobile devices.