Watch Netflix Movies In Your Firefox Browser

February 27th, 2007 Davis Posted in Technology, Movies, DRM, Microsoft, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned |

Normally, I’m a pretty big fan of Microsoft. Sure the company takes a lot of heat for being such a massive software behemoth, but despite all the complaints about their operating system, I’ve had remarkably few problems with Windows.

I won’t always choose Microsoft over another company, but for the most part, I tend to gravitate towards their products because I know that they’ll work with my existing consumer electronic universe and because it’s more likely that a vendor will support Microsoft than other solutions.

The one exception to this though, is when it comes to their Internet Explorer browser. I’m not exactly sure how Microsoft lost their edge on the browser market, but at this point IE has failed pretty miserably and I expect that they’ll continue to lose market share to Firefox until they can improve the experience associated with using their browser. Not only does the IE browser open up your computer to security exploits, but even after their upgrade, it’s user interface is still bulky and cumbersome.

If it was up to me, I’d uninstall the browser from my computer and ban it permanentely, but there are still too many sites out there that exclusively support IE, for me to be able to get rid of it entirely.

Yesterday, I needed to upgrade my browser to IE7, in order to get a piece of software to work. I didn’t think it’d be a big deal, but after the upgrade it reminded me why I hate this browser as much as I do.

Before allowing me to upgrade, Microsoft required that I first prove that I owned the license to my operating system. While I understand Microsoft’s goal of trying to reduce piracy, as a consumer, it still doesn’t sit well with me that I have to prove I’m not a criminal before being allowed to use a piece of software that is free to begin with.

The entire upgrade took me almost 30 minutes to complete. After downloading and installing the new browser, Microsoft then made me sit through two computer restarts, several hard sell attempts at getting me to change my default search engine to MSN search (not going to happen) and to add icing on the cake, after completing the upgrade I had to screw around for another 20 minutes trying to uninstall an internet STD, that decided that IE7 was a good place to install a smiley face toolbar.

While normally, using IE isn’t as painful as upgrading it, I still hate having to switch back and forth between browsers. Most of the sites I use tend to let me use Firefox anyway, but ever since Netflix launched their WatchNow feature, I’ve found myself needing to use IE more and more. It’s not a huge deal, but it is pretty annoying having to remember to log into Netflix using IE whenever I visit the site.

Fortunately, Smashed Life has come up with a pretty good solution for how to use the Firefox browser to play WatchNow movies. It involves installing the IE tab for Firefox and then setting up Netflix’s site, so that it always opens in an IE tab instead.

This isn’t an “official” solution by Netflix, but I tested it last night and can confirm that it works pretty cleanly on my system. I had trouble getting Netflix to automatically load in the IE tab at first, but after fooling around with the Firefox plugin a bit, I was able to figure it out. When all was said and done, it probably took me less than five minutes (and no computer restarts) to set up the plugin, compared to the 30 minutes I spent messing around trying to do a complete IE upgrade.

Most people probably won’t care enough to download a plugin, just so that they can avoid using IE in a separate browser, but I’ve found this to be a pretty neat solution. By customizing the plugin, I now no longer have to worry about remembering to open a new browser when using Netflix’s Watch Now feature. Hopefully, we’ll still see Netflix come out with an official Firefox support for WatchNow in the future, but at least in the near term, this is a good fix for those who’d rather forget about IE, even if you still need to use it sometimes.