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Does anyone know if it's possible to get the "View In Mac App Store" button on web based pages (e.g. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jellyfissh/id416399476 ) to open the mac app store when using Firefox? It only seems to work in safari atm.

My specs: Running Firefox 4 on OSX 10.6.7 on Macbook Pro

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  • Chrome used to work, but now when I click a Mac App Store link it just forwards me to the page about the MAS on Apple's site. I'm not sure why!
    – sudo rm -rf
    Commented Mar 31, 2011 at 18:06

2 Answers 2

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It looks like Apple updated the code to detect which client you are when connecting to the app store. I checked and they have script that called a function its.detect.Itunes which detects what browser and operating system you are on, and if it isnt Safari, the link does not return an app store link.

Interestingly it does seem to have handlers for chrome and firefox, but either they made a mistake or they are purposefully making it so you cannot use Firefox to one click browse the mac app store.

I checked if switching firefox's user agent worked, and while it did load the page momentarily, and the function clearly had a anchor link instead of a direct href, it immediately redirects to a blankly loading page forever.

At this point it looks like it is probably safari or bust.

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  • It can't be on purpose, there's nothing in it for Apple to insist you use Safari and anything that gets between you and a purchase is downright bad for them.
    – Matthew Frederick
    Commented Apr 16, 2011 at 23:23
  • Like I said, its either a bug or a feature.
    – ConstantineK
    Commented Apr 16, 2011 at 23:39
  • Not like you said: I'm saying no, definitely not a feature, definitely a bug.
    – Matthew Frederick
    Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 4:07
  • If you say so, I have no way of knowing that with certainty without doing a lot more debugging or by being the person who wrote it.
    – ConstantineK
    Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 12:06
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I just got this working by overriding the useragent string.

(tl;dr: There is a firefox plugin called User Agent Overrider which does what is detailed below. My reasons for not using the plugin is, that I find the below easy enough to do manually and don't do it often enough to warrant the need for a whole plugin in my already overladen-with-plugins Newmoon.)

Steps (More detailed steps, as I found later, are available here):

  1. Check whether the 'View In Mac App Store' link works in Safari. If so, in Safari copy your useragent string by visting http://whatsmyuseragent.com/

  2. Now back in firefox, open about:config in a new tab and right click to create a new string with preference name as general.useragent.override.apple.com and with the value as the useragent string you copied earlier (which in my case was Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/600.7.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.2.7 Safari/537.85.16)
    (Look at 'A' in the following snapshot)

    enter image description here

  3. When you are done, it should look like 'B' in the above snapshot
    No need to restart the browser, refresh the page (for example: this) and try clicking on the 'View In Mac App Store'.

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