In today’s post I’ll show you how to use a workaround that allows you to use an unsupported browser on a website that does not officially support it.
If you are anything like me, then you probably have a favorite web browser that you use day in and day out. I personally prefer to use the Dissenter browser on Mac OS X. Dissenter is a free-speech and privacy conscious browser. Dissenter defaults to blocking Big Brother Tech ads and trackers by default. It also creates a special censorship-proof comment section for free-speech discussion on ANY URL. Dissenter is built from the open source Brave browser codebase, which itself is a derivative of Chromium. So it should work on any websites that support Chrome.
I had been previously using the Mozilla Firefox web browser for years. But I switched to the free-speech Dissenter web browser after Mozilla Firefox came out in support of Internet censorship, rather than standing up for and defending one of America’s most important founding principles, the freedom of speech. I had also recently moved from the heavily censored and privacy challenged Facebook to the free-speech and privacy conscious MeWe social media platform.
Unfortunately after a recent MeWe update they started blocking Dissenter as an unsupported browser with the following message as soon as you login.
Dissenter had been working fine for months on the MeWe website without any issues. As I mentioned before, Dissenter is a derivative of Chromium, so it should work on any website that supports Chrome and according to the message they do support Chrome. It is possible that they are testing for a later version of Chrome than the version of Chromium that Dissenter is currently based on. If that is the case then it should start to work again after the next Dissenter update. Until then however, I didn’t want to have to switch to using a different web browser just for MeWe.
So in the meantime, I started looking at the site with the web developer tools (View -> Developer -> Developer Tools) to see if I could bypass the browser check. Fortunately, you can simply use the developer tools to ‘Toggle device toolbar’ using the responsive design devices icon in the lower left corner of the screen on the Developer toolbar as seen below.
Then use the device toolbar to set the view to ‘iPad Pro’ in the top center of the view and click the rotate button to orient it horizontally as seen below. This will have Dissenter mimic an iPad Pro and allow you to successfully log in.
Once you are logged in you may close the Developer tools by clicking the ‘X’ close icon in the lower right of the developer tools toolbar as seen below. Then the site should work normally from there.
Please note however, if the site does implement some new features that may not yet be compatible with the current version of Dissenter, then some features may not work properly. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Hopefully the next update of Dissenter will make this workaround unnecessary.
I hope this post helps someone who finds themselves in a similar situation!
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