Enable Facebook Video Calling In OS X Lion Safari, Chrome, Firefox [How To]

Facebook launched Skype-powered video calling yesterday. The feature works on all major versions of Mac and Windows (Linux not supported), but doesn’t work on OS X Lion. Today, we’ll guide you on how to get Facebook’s video chat feature working on Apple’s latest version of OS X.

Facebook

OS X Lion reached Gold Master status a week ago and is available for download on Mac Dev Center. Owing to it not being, you know, available for the general public yet, Facebook does not support it. There is, however, a way to get video chat working:

The main objective behind today’s guide is to trick Facebook into thinking that you’re on a compatible operating system (such as Snow Leopard or Windows 7). To do that, we’ll be simply changing your browser’s user-agent:

Safari

If you’re on the latest version of Safari on Lion; go to System Preferences > Advanced and enable developer menu. You will now see a new option on the menu bar titled “Develop”, click on it. Now simply click on User Agent > Safari 5.1 – Mac. That’s it!

Also required: patting yourself on the back for a job well done. Facebook will now let you enable video chatting.

fbchat-safari

Firefox

Firefox has a pretty active plugin community so there isn’t much headache involved in fooling Facebook. All you need to do is install the User-Agent Switcher plugin from here and switch to Internet Explorer 8 from Tools.

fbchat-firefox

Chrome

Since Chrome, like Firefox, has a very active plugin community, things are pretty easy. Install the User-Agent Switcher plugin from here.

Once the plugin is installed, click on its icon near the address bar and, finally, click on Internet Explorer 8. fbchat-chrome

 

Important last step: Go to facebook.com/videocalling and Get Started! Happy video chatting!

We won’t be covering on how to pull the trickery off on alternate, less-popular browsers (like Opera on Lion) since only a minute fraction of our readers use them to visit our site. You may simply search for “how to change user-agent on <your browser name>” on Google to get things working.

Facebook launched Skype-powered in-browser video chatting yesterday. The service is being seen as a response to Google+’s solid Hangouts feature. Well, with 750 million users and Skype’s generally reliable backend, +Hangouts doesn’t seem all that attractive anymore, does it?

(via Best Techie)

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