Free browsing on PC through Airtel LIVE!

After the RIPping death of all free GPRS tricks, finally I discovered a trick to browse free through Airtel LIVE! This one works in any circle in which browsing through TeaShark over Airtel LIVE! is free. I tested it in Punjab circle, and it works like a charm. Ok, so here we go.

Requirements:

1. A PC with any popular OS(Win, Lin)
2. Mozilla Firefox browser
3. Following extensions for Firefox: Modify Headers, XHTML-MP, Wmlbrowser, OpenInBrowser, Mason

Procedure:

1. Connect to net on your PC through your phone over the APN airtelfun.com
If you don't know how to do that, you're perfect example of a n00b so stay away from this post unless you learn that. Use google, learn that and then come back again.
2. Now install the above said extensions in FireFox, if you haven't installed them already.
3. In FireFox, in Tools menu click Modify Headers. Click the Configuration button, in the bottom right of the Modify Headers dialog.
4. Now, check the box that says Always On: Enable Modify Headers when this window/tab is closed
5. Now create a new entry in the Modify Headers dialog with following details:

Action: Modify
Name: user-agent
Value: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; EN-US) AppleWebKit/523+ (KHTML, like Gecko)

6. Save the entry and make sure a Green lit circle ahead of it. If not, then double click the entry to turn the red signal into green.
7. Now, in Firefox in Tools menu(in Windoze) or Edit menu(in Linux), click Options or Preferences. There in Advanced tab, in Network tab configure FireFox to use the proxy 100.1.1200.99 and port 8080 for all requests.
8. Now start browsing. Viola!!! You won't be charged anything for opening any site!!!!

Ok, so now, what were the other extensions for?
1. XHTML-MP: Since Airtel Live! has Nokia WAP Gateway installed at the backend, so sometimes for some sites it serves the content-type as application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml or simply application/xhtml+xml. If you don't have XHTML-MP extension installed, instead of viewing the page, you'll get the dialog to save the page.
2. Wmlbrowser: For browsing the WAP sites.
3. OpenInBrowser: Sometimes, some sites which haven't been programmed keeping XHTML compliance in mind, will show an XML Parsing Failed error and you won't be able to view the site. OpenInBrowser extension lets you Reparse the document as html and make the page viewable. You already might be knowing XHTML is too strict about errors, and html is lenient.
On encountering any such page, in View menu, hover to View As, there select Other and in the content-type box type text/html and hit ok.
4. Mason: This is an alternative to OpenInBrowser. Through Mason, you can create a rule for any site that gives you problems. Just create a rule for the site, such that it always is parsed with text/html as the content-type.

Limitations of the trick:
1. The proxy doesn't support secure connnections, so no orkut, no gmail, no blogger! Any site with the URL starting with https won't open. Only http ones will open.
2. Sometimes the response times are too slow.
3. You'll encounter one of these too irritating errors several times:
a)Gateway received and invalid resposne from an upstream gateway.
b)Your request for a service couldn't be fulfilled.
In each case, just reload the page.

Ok, so how did I discover this trick? Where is the magic? How does it work for free?

My free Mobile Office working from past 7 months got shutdown recently. So, I thought of using an alternative for browsing. I used the TeaShark browser on my P1i, but TeaShark has display/rendering issues with sites on my phone. So, I was thinking to figure out why does teashark work for free. I setup an experiment, just changed the user-agent of FireFox to the one used by TeaShark. And bingo!!! To my amazement, I wasn't charged a single paise for opening any site.

Enjoy the free trick, share with your friends.