Accessing an Internet Explorer only site in Firefox

There was a time when websites were created for browsers not users. The website compatible for one browser would not render correctly on another. The developers built their own standards and features which were completely closed and non-inter operable.

In those times websites proudly displayed logos of loyalty to their intended browsers like "Designed for Internet Explorer or Netscape" etc. Thanks to w3c ( World Wide Web Consortium), for bringing order to that chaos, for creating consumer level standards that the developers needed to follow. For their efforts there was a universal standard for the first time.

Almost all of today's websites display in any web browser correctly. But there are some developers who live in their past, creating websites that do not allow users of competitor browsers to view content properly. Here is a solution to view websites marked 'For Internet Explorer' in FireFox.

When a browser tries to access a web page, it sends a request to the server that hosts the site. The request contains name of the page the browser want to fetch, IP address of the requester, the name and version of web browser used among others. You can see a complete tutorial on these requests here.

The name of the browser is send under a label User Agent. This is the part the server use to differentiate the users based on their browser.

What we essentially do in this work around is that we change the content of the request send to the server to make it look like coming from an Internet Explorer browser. The server will be fooled and the page will be delivered believing the recipient to be IE.

There is a good plug-in available to firefox which does this change in user agent easily, descriptively named User Agent Switcher.

Go to the above page by clicking the link and click the 'download now' button.

Wait for 3 seconds (big deal!!) and when the installation button gets activated click on it and the add-on will be installed. Restart firefox to complete the installation.

If you are NOT seeing the user agent switcher in the toolbar, right click on the tool bar and select customize. A screen like the one below will be opened and drag the user agent ( grayed out ball when in inactive state) to the tool bar.

 The default and activated states of user agent switcher

click on the down arrow and you will be presented with the target options. Select the one you need ( anyone in the IE category would be fine), and reload the page. you should be fine with the IE only website now.
Note 1 - The switching of user agent affects all current tabs and future tabs so an error might show up in an already open tab ( Eg: Mail might show an error because the user agent you are logged on is changed all of a sudden).
Note 2 - After you are done with the IE only website, remember to switch back the user agent to the default one.