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I tried to watch live stream from cbsnews, however installation flash is required. I don't want to install flash, so I set Develop -> User Agent -> Safari iOS 10 as usual try to deceive the website that I'm using iPhone. However it didn't work. How does it recognize the device I'm using?

Is there any way to watch this live stream without using flash?

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  • Websites may use many different methods for detecting what browser you're using. Changing the user agent is a common way to fool them, but it's not guaranteed to work. In such cases, if there's no View Mobile Site link, you may have no other choice but to install Flash (short of telling the webmaster to dump Flash, and good luck with that). The same is true with iOS Safari's Request Desktop Site, by the way. Many websites don't honor such requests anymore.
    – user11633
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 21:03
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    Thank you for your explanation @Phong. I really appreciate all the other answers and just want to let you know I'm not the one voted you down.
    – Joe Li
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 21:06
  • FWIW I use Chrome to view sites that require flash... it has its own built in version of Flash so you don't have to put up with it in Safari and any other browsers you use.
    – dwightk
    Commented Feb 27, 2017 at 18:37

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I assume you have Google Chrome installed? Open the link in Google Chrome and click "enable flash." A "pop up blocked" message will appear at the right of the search box. Click on it and enable the website to use Shockwave Flash.

You do not need to have installed Adobe Flash using the Adobe Flash installer on your Mac for this to work.

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  • Thank you and this is a good answer, but I really want to use Safari...Why the user agent method does not work?
    – Joe Li
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 20:48
  • Sorry, I couldn't tell you. Just use this as a last method if nothing else works.
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 20:49
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Open Safari Preferences, go to the 'Advanced' tab. At the bottom of that, enable the 'Develop' menu. This will add another menu to the Safari menus, called, you guessed it, 'Develop'. In newer versions of Safari, this menu contains an entry 'Enter Responsive Design Mode' which opens up any web page as if you are browsing from an Apple mobile device; User Agent, Screen size and all. That should get you what you are after.

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  • Sorry, but that does not work. The web page still ask me to install flash.
    – Joe Li
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 20:30
  • if you load the same page on an iOS device does it work? It may be that this site just requires flash for everything.
    – dwightk
    Commented Feb 27, 2017 at 18:38
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How does it recognize the device I'm using?

There are several ways for websites to determine which browser and kind of device you are using. Modifying your "User Agent" profile won't necessarily bypass them. See this related question from security.stackexchange. You can use the "What Is My User Agent" website to determine what you are sending out.

With Safari, try killing the process Safari Web Content (from Activity Monitor). Also, try clearing your cookie cache - including "supercookies".

The cbsnews live stream video plays on my iPhone 4S running iOS 9.3.5 so after clearing your cache and killing Safari Web Server, you could try a User Agent profile like: 

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_3_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13G36 Safari/601.1

...this User Agent profile was obtained from my iPhone using the "what's my user agent" website.

Also from this How-To site you could try these or similar "User Agent" profiles:

What is a User Agent Anyway?
When Safari visits a website, it will send a string of text such as this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/600.3.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.3 Safari/600.3.18

This tells the web server that this particular user is running Safari 8 on a Mac running OS X 10.10.2.

It will obviously be different per the operating system and web browser. > A computer running Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 10 would appear as such:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)

but I think it is best to test a known, working user agent profile on your system.

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  • But this doesn't work for this website. Have you tried?
    – Joe Li
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 20:40
  • But the user agent method did not work. I can play the video in my iPhone but not in Safari in macOS by changing the User agent to iPhone.
    – Joe Li
    Commented Feb 26, 2017 at 20:49
  • @JoeLi I'm not in a position to clear my cookies and kill Safari Web Server, so I cannot test the corresponding iPhone 4S User Agent profile adequately.
    – MmmHmm
    Commented Feb 27, 2017 at 18:03

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