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Maxthon has brought IE back into the game for myself. IE is still about the same speed to render, faster on autoscroll & google bar highlighting.

I still swap with Firefox about half the time. Extensions like googlebar and the web developer extension are definitely bringin it into competition.

The beauty of the FireFox design IS the plugins - you can do this kind of thing.

Oh, and by the way, there are many other ways to do this, and you can also do it in Opera and Mozilla. Here's a comprehensive article on how to manipulate the User Agent strings.

You won't need that pref bar extension once you've installed the Web Developer extension. It lets you turn off cookies, javascript, check cookie info, validate CSS/HTML, resize to various window sizes, turn off images, outline block elements, show image paths/sizes, etc.

It makes my life easier.

But I don't miss it as much as any machine I use regularly that absolutely must run IE soon finds itself with the Google Toolbar installed. (I didn't realise how many popups that blocked back in my IE days until I used a machine without it).

Indeed, the developer tools for Mozilla rock. The best dev toolbar I've seen has to be the Web Developer Extension by Chris Spederick. It's AMAZING. I've been using the PNHToolbar for ages, but this one blows it away. The "View Style Information" targeting, where you then hover the mouse over any element and it displays the CSS heirarcy in the statusbar, makes it invaluable just for that feature alone.

If you use User Agent Switcher you can convince the website that you're running IE on Windows. Has anyone used this technique, and then tried the demo service on Linux?

Some advice from someone who is keeping a vigilant eye on these XPI files: Unzip the file, do a grep or a findstr for the string "XMLHttpRequest". This is the API function that allows installed extensions to send and receive data though the internet. I know for a fact that the User Agent Switcher extension uses this function to secretly get a small text file. This occurs when checking for an update.

// Initializes the about dialog
function useragentswitcher_initializeAbout()
{
var latestVersion = 0;
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();

// This must be done to make generated content render
request.open("GET", "http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firebird/use ragent
switcher/version.txt", false);
request.send("");

One solution is to download and install the User Agent Switcher Extension. You can then have FireBird/Fox/Mozilla send the IE 6.0 User Agent string.

Another extension that was a requisite for me to move from IE to FireBird/Fox was the GoogleBar, which emulates the Google Toolbar for IE. (They also have ones to mimic MSN and Yahoo! toolbar, IIRC.)

Install User Agent Toolbar Widget or User Agent Switcher.

actually... the window, in which the (flash?) ad plays, is generated by javascript. i use the webdev toolbar for firebird, and it has a javascript on/off toggle. time to turn off javascript by default.

There's much more than tabbed browsing in Firebird. I suggest reading the why document before passing judgement.

Tabbed browsing is nice, but the real reasons I use FB are Find as You Type, Custom Keywords, and the Web Developer Toolbar.

Then you should just get the Web developer extension for Firebird. If your page is accesible on a publicly accesible site there's one click to verify.. plus plenty of other useful tools like outlining table (and custom) elements, loading the stylesheets in another tab, and so on and so on.

There is a customizable user-agent switcher plugin for Firebird with built in defaults including: IE6, Netscap 4.8, Opera 7.11.

firebird has a browser spoofing extension utility...

http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firebird/user agentswitcher/

If you use Phoenix, check out the User Agent Switcher that allows you to switch browser identification on the fly from a simple drop-down menue from Phoenix, no extra screen space taken up.