One hidden feature for Firefox that you may not know is its ability to become an iPhone. In fact this article is a world first (never published) and so you’re now the first to know!!! What do I mean by that? I mean every web page that’s designed for iPhone to view will be displayed exactly like an iPhone, and operate exactly how an iPhone would behave.

The advantage for an iPhone Emulator is that for WebApp developers, they can test their work without folking out $299 for an iTouch or more for an iPhone. I know there’s a fake iphone test site out there which basically is a shell that doesn’t work for all the sites. For example when you login to Facebook, iPhone has a very different look and feel than your normal browser view. For other curious souls they can also do the same of to see what iPhone apps are capable of.

iPhone FIrefox

So here goes…

In order to emulate an iPhone, the basic principal is to change the Firefox user agent to an iPhone.

1. Go and download the user agent switcher by clicking here. Follow the installation instructions in Firefox.

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2. The next step is to add the iPhone user agent. Click Tools | User Agent Switcher | Options | Options. In the dialog, click Add.

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3. In the description field, enter ‘iPhone‘. In the User Agent field, cut and paste the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

4. Click OK.

5. When you get back to Firefox, click Tools | User Agent Switcher | iPhone.

6. Now test it with awebsite that distinguish between an iPhone vs any other browser. For example Facebook is a good example. What you will see when you open Facebook is that it recognize the new user agent and thinks it’s talking to an iPhone. As a result you can see the URL bar displays http://iphone.facebook.com instead of the usual http://www.facebook.com. And that’s when you know your Firefox has now turned into an iPhone.

You can check out hundreds of WebApps at the Apple WebApps gallery here.

iPhone FIrefox

You can also compare this to a real iPhone:

iPhone Emulator

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