[Tip] How to Open a Website When Your Web Browser is Not Supported

Many times when you open a website, you get a message that your web browser is not supported and you need to use a different web browser. Actually many websites are designed for a particular web browser and it might be possible that the website is not compatible with your installed web browser, that’s why the website development team decided to block the website for the incompatible web browsers. All web browsers use different web rendering engine and sometimes a website is not compatible with a particular web rendering engine.

Same thing happened with the recently launched “Skype for Web” website which is currently supported by Google Chrome and Windows 10‘s built-in Microsoft Edge web browsers only. If you try to open the website in Mozilla Firefox, Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, Opera and Internet Explorer browsers, you will receive following error message:

Following screenshot shows the error message in action:

Now you may ask how a website knows which web browser was used to open it so that it can block the browser? Actually every web browser has a user-agent string which describes the browser name, browser version number, host operating system, etc. When you open a website in your web browser, the user-agent string is checked by the website and if the user-agent string matches with the incompatible/banned web browser, the website doesn’t open in the browser and you get the blocked/not supported message.

Following is an example of a web browser user-agent string:

The above user-agent string describes that the web browser is Google Chrome version 62.0.3202.9 used in Windows 10 64-bit (x64) edition.

Many times you may want to open a unsupported website in your favorite web browser and in such situations, spoofing browser’s user-agent string comes to rescue.

There are many extensions/add-ons available for web browsers which allow users to customize and change their browser’s user-agent string so that your web browser can act like a different web browser which is supported by the website in question.

Once you install these extensions, you can select a different web browser from the given list or manually type a different user-agent string and your web browser will send the selected browser’s user-agent string to the website and the website will open fine in your web browser which was actually not supported initially.

If you also want to open a particular website such as Skype for Web in your unsupported web browser, following steps will help you:

STEP 1:

First of all download and install the required extension.

If you are using Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge web browser, download and install the “User-Agent Switcher” extension from following link:

Download and Install User-Agent Switcher Extension in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge

If you are using Mozilla Firefox web browser, download and install the “User-Agent Switcher” extension from following link:

Download and Install User-Agent Switcher Extension in Mozilla Firefox

If you are using Opera web browser, download and install the “User-Agent Switcher” extension from following link:

Download and Install User-Agent Switcher Extension in Opera

STEP 2:

After installing the extension, you’ll get its icon added to the browser toolbar. Now open the website which is not supported in your web browser.

Now click on the extension icon in toolbar and you’ll get following pop-up screen:

You can click on a desired web browser icon shown under “Select a Desktop Browser” section such as Google Chrome, etc.

That’s it. As soon as you click on a browser icon, it’ll immediately change your web browser’s user-agent string to the selected browser. Now open the website which was not supported in your browser and now it’ll open without any problem.

PS:

If you decide to reset your web browser’s user-agent string to default, click on the “Tick mark” icon present at the bottom-left corner of the pop-up window and it’ll restore your web browser’s user-agent string.