How to change the User Agent string in Google Chrome 

Why would I want to do this?

The user Agent string is a bunch of text that tells the server hosting the website you are visiting what Web Browser you are using. You may want to make a site that only works for a certain browser like FF or IE work in Chrome. In my example I will use the user agent string that the iPhone’s Safari uses, this will make Chrome show the mobile versions of sites if they are available.

Let’s Get Started!

First right-click on the menu shortcut that launches Chrome, or whichever shortcut that you use when you want to launch it.



Click on the Properties link and you will see this Dialogue appear:

In the Target field that is highlighted in Blue, insert the following text:

--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"

Once you have done that, simply press OK and click the link you just changed.

This will make the mobile version of Google appear (if your homepage is Google, that is) like in this screenshot:

With this configuration you will be able to browse the mobile versions of sites like YouTube, Facebook and so on.

Now, if you want to change the User Agent to Internet Explorer 2, just for fun, you can change the user agent in the shortcut to:
--user-agent="Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 3.1)"
Interestingly, Internet Explorer 2.0 will be unsupported by YouTube soon:

Ok, that’s it. If you want to revert back to the default User Agent just wipe the user-agent string in your shortcut and wipe your cache with:

And:

Once that’s done everything should look good again.

For a complete list of User Agents visit useragentstring.com

Thank you for reading.

EDIT:
There is now an extension for Chrome that makes it easy for users to switch between user agents here.