Today we had a customer in the store who had just switched to Apple by buying a new MacBook. He was running into trouble with his company’s web-based calendaring and collaboration system, as the site required Internet Explorer 6 or greater to run. He’d browse to it using Safari or Firefox, and the site would throw an error and refuse access, presumably to make it easier for novice users to know which browsers work and which don’t. Turns out, it was compatible with Safari after all. We just had to tell Safari to masquerade as Explorer.
Unfortunately, not all web developers keep up with the times. It’s likely that this site’s administrators hadn’t conducted compliance testing since at least the release of Internet Explorer 7. It’s getting rarer and rarer, but plenty of sites out there still require Explorer. This trick won’t work on all of them, but it will for a good chunk of them.
While in Safari, select Preferences from the Safari menu. Now, click the Advanced button at the top right of the Preferences window, and check “Show Develop menu in menu bar.” Close the Preferences window, and notice the new Develop menu on top of your screen. In the Develop menu is the User Agent sub-menu. From the sub-menu, select Internet Explorer 7.0. Once this is done, the web sites you visit will think you’re using Explorer, and some of the especially restrictive sites will work for you!
Be mindful of the setting you choose, as Safari will not render some web sites correctly when pretending to be Explorer.