I’ve been doing some research into how some websites behave when accessed via a smartphone rather than a regular browser. Often, when visiting a site on your mobile you’ll automatically be redirected to a mobile version, however when doing this on a regular browser you won’t be redirected unless you appear to be a smartphone…
The way you do this is to change your user agent so your browser emulates your chosen platform rather than a regular browser. I had a little dig and found out that iPhone 3.0 is actually an option in the Firefox User Agent Switcher plugin, so it’s simply a case of installing this plugin, going into Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options and selecting iPhone. You’ll then be able to access sites as you would on an iPhone without being redirected to the regular version.
You can customise this further by adding additional user agents, for the geeks out there here’s a list of other mobile user agents including devices by BlackBerry, HTC, Nokia etc. and even devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Nintendo’s Wii.
If you’re new to the world of User Agent switching, the Firefox plugin has the major search engine user agents by default allowing you to see content as search engine crawlers see it - good for quickly checking that content is accessible or if it’s being cloaked (naughty naughty!)