Changing user agent for RESTClient firefox extension

This specific content was written 10 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Intro

If you are using RESTClient (and don’t want to switch to CURL) but need to modify the user-client when testing a request, there are two ways:

  • Adding a custom “user-agent” header through RESTClient
  • Changing the user agent through an extension.

Since RESTClient is an extension, by default it uses the user-agent of firefox.

As a start we can do a test and access the page http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ through the RestClient.

Below is a screenshot of the RestClient accessing a page printing the user agent.

RESRClient User Agent

Custom Request Headers

Click the menu “Headers” and “Custom Header” in order to add a User Agent.

Adding a header

 

For name enter “User-Agent”, and for the Value enter the ID you require.

Custom Header

User AgentBelow we see that the user-agent sent is now “test test”.

Custom User-Agent through Extension

In cases where the above does not work, or there is the requirement to not send a User-Agent, an extension can be used to change the user-agent of the browser.

One such plugin is “User Agent Switcher” available from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/ .

In my own situation I wanted to remove user-agent altogethUser Agent Switcherer, and what worked was installing the extension and adding an Agent called blank. This entry had a space for the user-agent field.

 

If everything fails…

Write a comment below. It would be interesting to see new problems.

Additionally, some well known command line tools are:

 



Menelaos Bakopoulos

Mr. Menelaos Bakopoulos is currently pursuing his PhD both at Center for TeleInFrastruktur (CTiF) at Aalborg University (AAU) in Denmark and Athens Information Technology (AIT) in Athens, Greece. He received a Master in Information Technology and Telecommunications Systems from Athens Information Technology and a B.Sc. in Computer Science & Management Information Systems from the American College of Thessaloniki. Since April 2008 he has been a member of the Multimedia, Knowledge, and Web Technologies Group.

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