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Automator Website Popup User Agent Problem

I've been looking forward to using the new "website popup" automator action to create standalone icons to launch specific pages from sites such as Netflix and Hulu on my desktop. I attempted to create a website popup for a show on Netflix but came across a problem. When I try to play a video on Netflix in the popup, it displays the "requirements for watching instant videos" page, implying that my browser does not meet the requirements. I found the problem by going to whatsmyuseragent.com in both Safari and in on of the Website Popups.


Safari's user agent reads as:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/534.51.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.1 Safari/534.51.22


But the Website Popup's user agent is only:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/534.51.22 (KHTML, like Gecko)


Clearly, Netflix is looking for that last bit starting with "Version..." and since the popup doesn't have that, Netflix will not allow it to continue.


The options in the Website Popup action allow you to choose from 3 user agents: Mac, iPhone, or iPad, but it doesn't give you the option of modifying it further.


I attempted to modify a copy of the Website Popup action...I was able to locate the iPad and iPhone user agent strings (but not the Mac user string, oddly enough), so I replaced the iPad string with the full Safari string up above. However, Automator will not load my modifed version of Website Popup, stating that it is damaged.


Anyone have any ideas how one might

a) modify the user agent in Website Popup while preventing Automator from thinking it is 'damaged'?

b) scratch build a custom Website Popup action with the correct user agent string?

c) find an existing third party alternative action that does the same basic thing as Website Popup?

d) somehow force past Netflix's user agent checker?


Thanks

Posted on Oct 15, 2011 10:06 AM

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Automator Website Popup User Agent Problem

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