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Comment by mnx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what other legacy, potentially useful features lurk behind user-agent gates. For example, you can get messages to work on the mobile version of Facebook by switching to a very old user agent. Maybe I should just permanently switch to an IE6 user agent, I wonder how many websites would still show the popup to encourage me to get a decent browser.

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I discovered that changing a few headers gives you full access to the private/internal API used by the mobile app of a pretty massive website.

The biggest WTF is you have to send a Bearer Token but the value isn't checked.

So many cool things you can discover with Charles

that is terrifying!

You can also view Facebook messages on mobile without Messenger by switching to the "Desktop Site" mode for your mobile browser.

Or you can use https://mbasic.facebook.com/ where the messsenger works too.

There's also Facebook's own Messenger Lite app if you're worried about bloat. It does everything I need and is about 10% of the size of full-blown Messenger.

messenger lite doesn't annihilate your battery like the full-featured messenger does, either

Yes, but it's a pretty bad experience - it has no js, so you need to keep refreshing the page. But yeah, I've used it on occasion.

Instagram has a nice one where you can take screenshot's with the camera feature via a desktop browser using the mobile user-agent.

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