Debugging Safari
There's a useful tip for Safari users doing the rounds just now. If you use an online banking system such as Nat West, you'll often find that you have to use Internet Explorer or one of the last releases of Netscape to logon. This is invariably down to the some over-zealous browser detection code put in by the web developers who have built the system.
This is generally put in place because the system was probably developed with only the main browsers in mind (IE), with the developers believing that the security and functionality of the system couldn't be trusted in anything other than IE 5 or 6. However, quite often you'll find that standards compliant browsers such as Safari and Camino will cope admirably.
The 'hack' allows you to switch on the Debug menu in Safari, from where you can change 'User Agent' to Internet Explorer 5.2 (or anything you wish). The User Agent string is read by the browse detection code, so you can fool the code into thinking you're using a 'safe' browser, and do your online banking without leaving Safari.
Enabling the Debug menu is not just good for changing the User Agent string however, it's full of useful information. For example, web designers and developers will find the 'Show DOM tree' item useful, power users can access the 'Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts', though I can't see how the item 'Go to about:blank Soon' would be useful...
The hack involves opening a Terminal window and typing :
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugIncludeMenu 1
Then quit Terminal and boot up Safari.
{ via macosxhints and MacUser } [xlab : a mac os x weblog]
