Play GeForce Now in your browser, no Chromebook needed

Earlier this week, NVIDIA dropped a bomb on the gaming world by releasing the web-based version of GeForce Now. Much to the surprise of many, the service that lets you bring your games with you didn’t arrive for browsers of any flavor. Instead, NVIDIA made our day by launching GeForce Now as a Chrome OS exclusive. We can, and probably will wax philosophic about the implications this could have for Chrome OS as a platform. Today, however, I’m reaching out to the masses who were left out in the cold when GeForce Now debuted.

If you’re a Windows or macOS users, this really isn’t an issue as you can download the official GeForce Now app for your respective OS directly from NVIDIA. Linux users, on the other hand, don’t have a native option to use the streaming service. Thankfully, you don’t have to miss out on the action thanks to a little Chrome extension that happens to be offered by Google.

User-Agent Switcher

User-agent switchers and spoofers are nothing new. The extensions can be used for a variety of use-cases and they do exactly what the name implies. Users can quickly switch between user-agents to mimic a browser other than the one they are actually using. These tools come in especially handy when you’re developing for the web and need to see how your website loads on another browser. That’s just one of many applications but another purpose of user-agent switchers is to “spoof” your browser to make the website you’re visiting think you’re using a different web browser for any range of reasons. Google’s own user-agent switcher extension does exactly this and it will allow you to play GeForce Now in Chrome or the Chromium browser without a Chromebook.

To give it a try, you’ll obviously need to have Chrome or Chromium installed on your device. Then, head over to the Chrome Web Store and install Google’s User-Agent Switcher. Once you have it installed, head to Chrome’s settings and find the extensions menu. Look for the switcher and click the three-dot menu. Click “options” and now you can create a new user agent.

Under the name column, add whatever name you’d like so you can easily remember that it’s for GeForce Now. Under the “New User-Agent String” column, paste the following exactly as it is.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 13099.85.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.110 Safari/537.36

The “Group” column should automatically populate with Chrome. Leave the Append option as “Replace” and set the indicator flag to “ASX” and click add. Once you have that set up, you will want to close Chrome entirely and open GeForce Now in a new window. On the Downloads page, you should now be able to select Chromebook and the web platform will launch. You can permanently set this “spoof” to work only on GeForce Now while your other browsing defaults to Chrome by heading back to the extensions options menu. Click the “Permanent Spoof List” in the left-hand menu and paste play.geforcenow.com in the domain column. For the user-agent string, select your newly created agent. Boom! You should now spoof Chrome OS anytime you navigate to Geforce Now’s streaming player. I can’t guarantee that NVIDIA won’t put a stop to this at some point but for now, it’s a sure-fire way to play GeForce Now on your Linux device.

Source: Android Police