A lot of friends had been asking me as to how my Yahoo Mail Beta would work on Windows Millennium, Windows 98 or Linux, so I am writing about it here.

We start from the basics of the problem to solve it (college taught me something didn’t it 😉) How does Yahoo know I am not using Windows XP ? Answer is your user agent, the browser communicates your user agent to any site you access. Any workaround?

In Opera : No easy way, but in Firefox one can edit the useragent easily and that’s what’s going to help us.

Step 1 : Backup Everything, Although the step doesn’t involve anything risky AFAIK, I still tell you to backup and release myself from liability. In this case just remember the key value that you are going to edit or even better make it blank!

Step 2 : Type about:config in your address bar

Step 3 : Right Click on any entry, Select new string and enter string name as ‘general.useragent.override’.

Step 4 : Take Your Pick Mozilla Firefox versions from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#Browsers or just use

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0.1

You might want to replace the version at the end to suit your version of Firefox.