Quick Chrome Tip

A lot of people ask me questions about sites that don't work with Chrome. I've given the tip to several people, so I thought I would post it here.

There are a number of sites that use a technique called user-agent sniffing. Browsers send an identifier when they connect to websites that indicate what kind of browser they are. Some sites serve different content based on the user-agent.

Anyways, many sites don't detect Chrome correctly, which makes the sites not work in Chrome. There's a quick (but temporary) work-around for those of you on Windows:

1. Create a new shortcut to chrome.exe (you can copy an existing shortcut)
2. Edit the shortcut (right click it and click "properties") and add a switch to change the user agent: in the "Target:" field, add this to the end:

"[...long path here...]\chrome.exe" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.5.12"

Then click "ok". Then, if you have Chrome still open, close it.

Now, if you launch Chrome via that new shortcut, it will 'pretend to be' Firefox 3.5. Sites that block Chrome but allow Firefox should work now.

Enjoy,

Glenn