For those interested in the whole browsers+pricing thing: informationweek.com/internet/ebusi… & slate.com/articles/busin…
— Miss Potter (@hellomisspotter) October 23, 2012
Curious, I clicked through the links, read the articles about how your browser/OS is detected, and you are shown conditional pricing based off of that information. While this sucks, fortunately, if you're a chrome user, there is a fairly easy work-around that you can do in order to see if sites you're visiting are showing you conditional pricing.
The Workaround
Right click in a page, and go down to inspect element. Doesn't matter what site you're on, we just need to be able to access the menu. I've done it in a blank chrome tab:
You should get a window pop up similar to the one below. Go ahead and click the little cog icon in the bottom right corner.
It's going to bring up a semi opaque box. There are 3 tabs at the top. You're going to want to click on the Overrides tab. Once you do, you'll see a checkbox named User Agent. Go ahead and check that to make it active.
You'll see the dropdown light up, and it'll show you a list of different browsers. Since Internet Explorer 7,8, & 9 are all strictly Windows, I often choose one of those.
Websites now recognize you as the browser you selected in that dropdown list. You can verify at the My Browser Info website. If you go to that site before you perform any of the steps above you'll get something like this:
Your Browser User Agent String is
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4
Notice it tells you Mac, Intel, AND OS version. After you make the switch, you get:
Your Browser User Agent String is
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
MSIE 9.0 = Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
Windows NT = Detects you as a Windows User.
Now you can buy things on the internet looking like a "poor person" again. I'm sure there are add-ons for Firefox. A simple search for change user agent string firefox in google might get you somewhere.
When you're done with all your purchasing, make things normal again simply by unchecking the User Agent box shown above.