14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu and Linux users are now able to watch Netflix natively in Google Chrome after the company finally updated their user agent that was inconvenient for so many people.
We need to recap what’s happened in order to get a broader perspective of this event. Just until a few weeks ago, Linux users had to make some modifications that would essentially trick the Netflix service into thinking that it was accessed by another operating system.
Netflix has a user agent, a tool that allows them to know what operating systems are connected to their service and on what browser, among other things. Potential Linux customers could not access the streaming service because the user agent would not allow them to connect. There were of ways of going around that issue, but no one really wants to do that. If given the choice, people will try to use a native solution, without having to install third-party packages.
A couple of weeks ago, a Netflix engineer contacted the Ubuntu devs and explained what they had to do in order for Netflix to be available without any hacks. Basically, all they needed to do was to update one of the libraries and Netflix would do the rest.
Netflix is now native in Ubuntu
The Netflix engineer kept his promise and the user agent has been updated. That means that people who are using Ubuntu or any of the Ubuntu-based systems (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, and so on) are now able to watch the Netflix service by going to the website using the latest Google Chrome and choosing the HTML5 option.
As you might suspect, the user agent has been updated only for Google Chrome and none of the other Internet browsers will work, not even Chromium or Opera, not to mention Firefox. The reason for this is that Chromium does not include any kind of DRM support (and never will) and the Firefox DRM functions are not yet ready. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. In this case it's a technology embedded in the browser that allows the content provider to protect the stream.
How you know if you got what it takes
Normally, if you perform all the regular updates, the library that's responsible (libnss3-nssdb or Network Security Security libraries – shared databases) should already be in place. If you are using something based on Ubuntu and the Netflix streaming doesn't work, it must be something on the developer's side.