Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Useful for web developers: "HeaderControl" add-on

If you familiar with web programming, you know that sometimes Googlebot (the google crawler)
sees your website differently what you expect. If you open a website with Firefox or Internet Explorer or any other client, your browser first send  an  "HTTP header" to  the website. This header got a field, named "user agent" which tells the webserver what client do you using. For example if the user agent is something like this "...Chrome/9.0.597.107 Safari/534.13",  than the webserver knows you are using Chrome browser.

So every client has got a specific user-agent. For example the googlebot or yahoo crawler have got different user-agents as well (they are "clients" too). So the webserver usually knows if the website visited by a crawler or just by a real user who using a browser.

Now with the HeaderControl Firefox add-on you can change your Firefox client to google crawler or anything you want, so you will see what that crawlers "see" in a website.


You can set your user-agent website specific if you want, too.


A note:
In the HeaderControl, you can set refferrer , or Accept-Language as well. So its recommended for web programmers.

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