Accessing "Windows Only" Web Sites With Safari
Some web sites are designed to only work with Internet Explorer on
Windows. Sometimes, these web sites might work with most any browser,
but the web site checks your browser and refuses to cooperate with
anything but Internet Explorer on Windows. Fortunately, Safari
has the ability to "trick" these web sites into thinking Safari is
really IE on Windows. If tricked in this way, the entire web site might
not work, but more of it will usually work.
To accomplish this, you need to first add a "debug" menu to Safari,
then use that menu to specify the user agent. The "user agent" is web
lingo for the type of browser and computer you are using. With
Safari's debug menu, you can select several different user
agents. Step-by-step, here is how to do it:
1) Quit Safari so it's not running.
2) Run the program called "Terminal" which is located in your
Applications->Utilities folder.
3) Type the following command into Terminal exactly as shown:
defaults write com.apple.Safari
IncludeDebugMenu 1
4) Quit from the terminal program, and launch Safari again. Safari
should now have a "Debug" menu. If so, proceeed to step #5. If not,
check the command you typed above. Case is important.
5) In Safari, select the Debug -> User Agent -> Windows MSIE 6.0
menu item.
Now, any web sites that you access will think Safari is really Internet
Explorer 6.0 on Windows. To switch this back, select
"Automatically Chosen" as the user agent, which is the default. Then
web sites will think you are using Safari again. To completely
get rid of the Safari debug menu (get back to normal), follow these
steps.
1) Quit Safari so it's not running.
2) Run the program called "Terminal" which is located in your
Applications->Utilities folder.
3) Type the following command into Terminal exactly as shown:
defaults write com.apple.Safari
IncludeDebugMenu 0
4) Quit from the terminal program, and launch Safari again. Safari
should no longer have a "Debug" menu.