How To: Set Up Facebook Video Calling on Lion

Keaton Taylor -

You might have heard that Facebook announced Video Calling with the help of Skype on their service today. You might have also noticed that if you are running a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion it simply does not work. In reality the Facebook video calling feature will work on Lion but is blocked due to the unofficial nature of Mac OS X Lion. Below are a few simple steps to get Facebook Video Calling working on any modern browser in Mac OS X Lion. We’re simply going to change your browsers user-agent to trick Facebook into thinking you are on a compatible OS.

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Safari

Using the latest version of Safari on Lion simply enter system preferences and under the advanced tab enable the developer menu. Once clicked you will see a new menu option on the menu bar labeled “Develop”. Click on this and you can change the user-agent to something that will work with the Facebook Video Calling Service. I’ve tested Safari 5.1 (Mac), 5.0.1 (Mac), and Firefox 4.0.1 (Mac) and they all work properly. If you are confused reference the image below:

Google Chrome

Two options for Chrome exist firstly you can change the user-agent via a simple command in terminal. When Chrome is closed type the following in terminal.

open /Applications/Google Chrome.app   –args -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.19″

Or, you could download this plugin for Google Chrome that will allow you to switch the user-agent directly within the browser.

Firefox

Similar to the second method for Chrome simply download this plugin and select the user-agent from the image below.

Once you have modified the user-agent you may also need to enable Facebook Video Calling for the first time. To do this simply navigate to http://facebook.com/videocalling and click get started. You’re all done. Enjoy the new features of Mac OS X Lion and Facebook Video Calling at the same time.

If you have any questions or comments leave a comment below.