User-Agent Switch

Has anyone experience in this?

By adding a switch it is sometimes possible to visit sites that are otherwise barred to your browser.

For example, Gmail supposedly has designed pages for the i-Pad and by using an appropriate switch for a browser on a normal computer one can get the "Gmail on i-Pad" experience for what it's worth.

Here's a bank site that doesn't allow one to get to the login screen if the browser is Chrome whereas Internet Explorer and Firefox work just fine:
www.idbi.com

But, if I add this switch to Chrome, then Chrome gets there as well!
-user-agent="Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko)"

I suspect that it's overly lengthy and could be shortened, but basically, I'm looking for a switch that will overcome trivial barriers.
(Sites which are downright incompatible (such as those using ActiveX) are another matter.)

My little experience with Opera showed me that Opera has the switch facility built into one of its menus although they request that such switches not be used fearing an under-reporting of Opera users.

There's an extension for Chrome described here: http://www.renjusblog.com/2010/03/google-chrome-user-agent-switcher.html.

The article also describes a way to spoof IE8:

Must try it the next time I come across an IE-only site.

I gather that there are different ways of sniffing browsers, some easy to get round, others not so...