When it comes to the Internet, people associate Google with it the most. It only seems appropriate that when browsing the web, using Google’s browser will provide the best experience with it. It’ll also be the basis of making our experience of browsing the web on our limited resources the best possible.

Installing Google Chrome for Windows

Update: Google discontinued the Google Pack software installer a week after this article was posted. The original contents of the article will still be included at the end of the article for archive purposes.

Due to the way Google Chrome works on Windows and the methods we’ll be using to change its user-agent, we have to install Chrome in a certain way. Normally, we would go to http://www.google.com/chrome and install it from there. This would then allow Chrome to run on your profile with very little need for administrative permissions. Due to a limitation of Windows shortcut properties, this is a problem for us. Thankfully, there’s an alternate way to install Chrome.

Note: If you already have Chrome installed, you will need to uninstall it first.

Instead, navigate to http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?system=true. This leads to a a special alternate installer for the Google Chrome web browser. The site won’t look any different from the regular Chrome installation page.

Below the Terms of Service are two checkboxes. One asks if you’d like to Set Google Chrome as my default browser while the other asks if you’d like to Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google. I recommend making Chrome your default browser. Sending information to Google is up to you, depending how you feel about privacy.

Once you’ve checked the settings as you’d like, click the Agree and Install button to begin the download and installation.

If you’re using Internet Explorer and this is the first time you’re installing a Google product, you’ll be given the option to Save or Run the file being downloaded. Click the Run button to save yourself a step. Being the install runs, Internet Explorer will again verify if you want to run the installer. Again, click Run to begin the installation process.

Once Chrome is finished downloading and installing, the browser will launch for the first time.

Going Mobile with Google Chrome

At this point, Chrome is still a full desktop browser, meaning if you try going to any web site, you will get the full, media rich, made for large screens versions of sites. We need to slim these sites down. As mentioned in a previous post, that means we need to fool web sites.

The method for pulling this off involves making some changes to your Start menu shortcuts. To begin, click the Start menu and right-click on All Programs. In the menu that pops up, select Open All Users.

This will bring up the standard Windows Explorer window showing the contents of your All Programs menu. Open the Programs folder, then the Google Chrome folder. You should see two icons: Google Chrome and Uninstall Google Chrome. We are needing to make a copy of the Google Chrome shortcut. The easiest way to do this is to select the Google Chrome shortcut, click the File (Organize on Vista and 7) menu at the top of the window, and select Create Shortcut. This will make a duplicate of the Google Chrome shortcut.

We will need to change some settings on the second Chrome shortcut we made. To do so, highlight the second Google Chrome shortcut, click the File (Organize on Vista and 7) menu, and select Properties. The properties dialog box should appear with the Shortcut tab selected. If not, select the tab.

For our Chrome setup, we’re going to trick Chrome into thinking it’s Google’s premiere phone, the Google Nexus S. In order to do this, we’ll need to add some additional text to our shortcut. Navigate to the end of the Target field and add a space. After the space, type (or copy/paste) in the following:
--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; en-us; Nexus S Build/GRJ22) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"
At the time of this writing, the user-agent string above is the latest used by the Google Nexus S. A complete list of user-agents for this phone can be found at http://deviceatlas.com/node/2282190#user_agent_strings.

After entering the necessary information, click the OK button at the bottom.

We should make our new shortcut stand out a little more, so let’s rename it by selected the second Google Chrome shortcut, clicking the File (Organize in Vista and 7) menu and select Rename. You can name it anything you want, but I’m going to name it Google Chrome Mobile.

Our new fake Mobile version of Chrome won’t work if you have any Chrome windows open. So be sure to click the Wrench menu in Chrome and select Exit at the bottom of the menu. To launch your new “mobile” browser, click the Start menu, then All Programs, highlight the Google Chrome folder, then select Google Chrome Mobile (or whatever you called it in the previous step.)

At first, you won’t notice anything different about your browser. It’ll start the same as it did before. Navigate to http://www.google.com/. You will notice Google doesn’t look like your regular desktop version. You are seeing the mobile version of the Google web site instead. From now out, if a mobile version of a site exists, you will see its mobile version.

Although Chrome is now set up for use as a mobile web browser, you’ll notice there may be some limitations to this method. In a later post, I’ll cover a few of these limitations and ways around them. But first, I’ll show you how set up this same method on Mac OS X and Linux-based operating systems.

 

Previous Google Chrome Installation Instructions

Due to the way Google Chrome works on Windows and the methods we’ll be using to change its user-agent, we have to install Chrome in a certain way. Normally, we would go to http://www.google.com/chrome and install it from there. This would then allow Chrome to run on your profile with very little need for administrative permissions. Due to a limitation of Windows shortcut properties, this is a problem for us. Thankfully, there’s an alternate way to install Chrome.

Note: If you already have Chrome installed, you will need to uninstall it first.

Instead, navigate to http://pack.google.com/. This is a special Google web site that allows you to install various Google software and other third-party software with a few clicks.

Unless you want to use any of the other software listed, uncheck everything except Google Chrome Web Browser. (Remember that this article will not focus on any other applications other than Google Chrome). Below the list of applications are two checkboxes (checked by default) to Set Google as my homepage and Set Google as my default search engine. Unless you have specific reasons why you would not want these options, I would leave them checked.

Once the options are selected as listed above or to your liking, scroll down to the bottom and click the Download Now button. Before the download begins, you will be asked to agree to the licensing agreement. To start the install process, click the Agree and Download button at the bottom.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, you’ll be given the option to Save or Run the file being downloaded. Click the Run button to save yourself a step. Being the install runs, Internet Explorer will again verify if you want to run the installer. Again, click Run to begin the installation process.

At this point, the Google Updater will begin downloading and installing Google Chrome. When the process is complete, click the Run Google Chrome Web Browser button to launch Chrome for the first time. If you are asked to set Google Chrome as your default browser, I highly recommend it.