Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Best mobile simulator for website

I came across few iPhone simulator which are merely an iframe running in smaller resolution to check the mobile compatibility of the site.

This method is not capable of checking the website which detects user agent and paves the website according to the device.

Another, method is to change the user agent of the browser and trick the website to show up as it should look on the mobile phone or any other device.

For example, my default user agent is set to :

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1215.0 Safari/537.2 AlexaToolbar/alxg-3.1

Well, the above string shows that I'm using windows NT device and installed Mozilla, Safari(AppleWebkit) and Chrome - including other stuff.


And, below is the user agent string for an iphone device.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7

For, iPad :

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F191 Safari/6533.18.5

Find more user agent string at www.useragentstring.com

If we find a way to change the user agent, then we can see the website's mobile or tablet appearance without really changing the our device.

Any guess, how can we do that?

Well, it's lot more easier than you think. Just add the following chrome extension to change the user-agent string on the fly.

Chrome extension for changing user-agent string

This will add a mask icon and on the top right corner. Just click and change the user agent to whatever you want.

Change the user agent string for chrome browser
Change the user agent string for chrome browser


Quick tip: Since you can know see the mobile site on your desktop browser, you can give more feeling like mobile by resizing your browser's size manually.

You can even change the user-agent string for Firefox, Safari and Internet explorer.

For Firefox: User agent switcher
For Safari: Safari user agent string

Relate links: 
How to Change Your Browser’s User Agent Without Installing Any Extensions

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