Screenshot of Netflix loading in Chrome

I just recently started playing with Chrome and after a bit of investigation I think I am going to make the switch from my current browser Maxthon. One problem I noticed when using Chrome was I could no longer watch instant movies in Netflix. Now, I could do what they recommend and use Internet Explorer (or Maxthon) to view a movie but I’m stubborn and wanted to view it in Chrome so I found a way.

When Netflix loads a video it is using Microsoft Silverlight which is something that Chrome supports and gave me my first clue that there is no reason why Chrome shouldn’t be able to view a Netflix video. The solution was actually rather simple, tell Netflix that I’m not actually using Chrome but using Safari on the Mac. In order to do this you just have to add the following parameter when starting Chrome.

 --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"

Add Parameter to Google Chrome Startup

To add this parameter right click the Google Chrome shortcut and go down to Properties. Then after chrome.exe in the Target: box paste the above text (make sure you include a space after chrome.exe).

I also tried changing the user agent to make Chrome appear like it is Internet Explorer. After applying that change Netflix gave me a activeX not supported error (image below). Since the problem was solved with the Safari user-agent text above I wasn’t too worried about it.

ActiveX is disabled