Is there a way to force a site to use browser user agent?

Question

I'm using a less-known browser called Gnome Web or Epiphany. It is still a modern browser that starts up fast and renders web pages fast. I am struggling to get Google sites, YouTube, Docs, Slides, etc. working because Google is doing some checks on my browser that see past the user agent and can actually tell what my browser is. I have it set to Firefox 10 right now and that made Outlook work right as well as Gmail chat. It's just that Sites doesn't work and I would really not like to switch between browsers just because of this one problem. Can anybody help?

Answer 1

The sort answer is no if the site checks more things apart from the user agent.

While you can fool some sites that only check the user agent string using another string the site likes, if a site is resolved to block some browsers using other detection techniques like capabilities detection you can't fool it unless there is some error in the detection scheme (and being a web page it can be fixed as soon as detected).

As you may guessed disabling JavaScript for preventing detection won't work, because those sites require JS to work so the very first check is look if JS is enabled.

Finally note that you are trying to fool Google, which knows a thing or two about how the web works and who has their own browser, if they do want to block another browser from any of their properties they know how to do it properly, sorry.