---
layout: post
title: ChromeFlix – or Netflix Watch Instantly for Google Chrome on the Mac
author: Steven
date: 2010-03-05 12:47:37
categories: 
- Musings
tags: 
- google
- os x
- software
featured_image: https://www.stevenjaycohen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wsi-imageoptim-new-google-logo.png
---
Netflix Watch Instantly should work fine in Google Chrome. After all, it is using the same rendering engine as Safari, so it should just work, right?

The answer is not that simple...

Google Chrome for the Mac is 100% capable of running Netflix Watch Instantly, but the web-geeks at Netflix are bad programmers.

The Netflix geeks did a very bad job of detecting Watch Instantly capable browsers. They are looking for the word SAFARI instead of looking for the word WEBKIT as an identifier in the browser's user-agent. Because of this, Chrome users get an apology instead of streaming movies.

Tsk, tsk, tsk... sloppy programming Netflix!

Here's the work around:

First, the easy way:
Download ChromeFlix which launches your currently installed version of Chrome but makes it pretend to be Apple's Safari.

Leopard Users (OSX 10.5.x) click here.

And here's the geeky way:
In terminal issue the following command:
open /Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app --args -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1 9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.19"
Or, the uber-geeky way:
Open terminal, edit .profile, and make an alias to the geeky command above.

Until Netflix decides to hire competent web-geeks, the choices above are your only solutions.

[coffee]