Get Netflix Working in Chrome with a User Agent String

Justin shares a fix for when Netflix doesn’t cooperate with your browser:

I use Chrome to watch Netflix using Instant Play. It worked last night, but would not work this morning – it redirected me to a page that said I’m using an unsupported browser when I attempted to play a
movie. I called up Netflix, who told me that there was a new change in Chrome that prohibited it from launching Netflix. You and I both know that’s not the case, Netflix simply added browser identification to their page. It is especially curious, since Chrome uses the same rendering engine that Safari does, and Netflix tech support stated that Safari is a supported browser.

The fix is to change your user agent string. This is super-easy with Chrome: just make a new desktop shortcut, and add the following to the target:

--user-agent="agent string goes here"

So, in my case, the target looks like this:

chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1;
en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12"

You can obtain your user agent string for another browser by visiting Useragentstring.com.

You can use this shortcut to launch a new Chrome window even if it’s currently open, so there’s no need to interrupt your bazillion open tabs to fire up your netflix stream. I prefer to use Chrome to view
Netflix, since it uses a lot less memory than Firefox or IE does (after loading Silverlight). Your miles may vary, of course.

[http://lifehacker.com/5715419/from-the-tips-box-netflix-on-chrome-dropbox-scripts-and-facebook-links]