Can I make Chrome appear Firefoxy?

July 5, 2009 7:16 AM

I like to watch a lot of streaming video especially for sports games. I usually use the Google Chrome browser. But some sites' media players say they only work with Firefox or IE and won't even give me the chance of trying it out in Chrome. Is there a way to trick the sites into thinking Chrome is really one of the approved browsers? Or is there really some fundamental difference that makes the players break in Chrome?

I am especially looking to watch sports on NBC. I recently uninstalled Firefox because I didn't like the new version. But I can reinstall it if that's the only solution. I am on a Windows Vista computer. Thanks.

posted by bluefly to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Web sites detect which browser you are using by asking the browser for what is called a user agent string. Every browser type and version has its own value for this string, but it's fairly easy to fake.

Firefox allows for a plugin to do this, but as Chrome does not (as of the last time I checked) support plugins, you will need to edit a .dll to change the reported value. There are instructions here. Here is a list of user agent strings for IE, as well.
posted by ellF at 7:37 AM on July 5, 2009

To get Netflix streaming (which uses Silverlight, I think) working in Chrome, I have a separate shortcut, which runs the following:

"c:\ridiculouslylongpath\chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.19"

I don't know why it works; I stole it off some random web site a couple months ago.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:39 AM on July 5, 2009