Change the User Agent in Internet Explorer 11

The user agent of a web browser is a string value which identifies that browser and provides certain system details to servers hosting the websites you visit. Thanks to the new flags page in Internet Explorer 11, it is now very easy to change the user agent string. You can experiment with it using the latest publicly available Windows 10 build at this moment, which is 9879. Let's see how it can be done.

Change the User Agent in Internet Explorer 11

To change the User Agent string in Internet Explorer 11, you need to open the Flags page mentioned above.

To change the User Agent string in Internet Explorer 11, do the following.

1. Type the text below in the IE address bar and press Enter on the keyboard:

   about:flags

2. There you will find the Custom User Agent section. Modify it according your personal needs.

For example, this is how the browser identifies itself by default.

The default user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0

However, in the User Agent box it has the following, old IE11 User Agent value:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Now, let's change it to my Linux browser. I will enter the following in the user agent box:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0

Change the option "Set the User Agent String to the string in the box below." to Enabled and click the Apply Changes button.

You must restart Internet Explorer to apply the new changes.

Let's check it once again:

Now Internet Explorer 11 tells websites that it is Firefox running on Linux.

To revert the changes, you need to open about:flags once again and set the "Set the User Agent String.." option to Disabled. Additionally, you can set the User Agent text box back to

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; rv:11.0) like Gecko

That's it.