How to Bypass Google’s Block on the Chromium Microsoft Edge

[The AchieVer]

How to Bypass Google’s Block on the Chromium Microsoft Edge 

Microsoft migrating from EdgeHTML to Chromium for its very own Microsoft Edge browser should basically convince Google it’s time to show some love for the Redmond-based software giant and actually support its efforts.

And while Google itself stepped in and helped the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge came to be, many believe the company still plays dirty occasionally.

And the most recent evidence, these people say, is the restriction that Google has put in place against the new Microsoft Edge browser on some of its services.

One of these services is Google Meet, which blocks users of Microsoft Edge preview to log in, with an error message prompting them to download a different browser.

“Meet doesn’t work on your browser. To join the video meeting install the current version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox,” the error message reads before providing users with direct download links for the two browsers.

A less restrictive warning is displayed when accessing Google Docs with the new Microsoft Edge browser:

“The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser,” this one reads.

However, in the case of Google Docs, you can simply ignore the warning and use the service with Microsoft Edge just fine.

Google says it’s not blocking Microsoft Edge, but rather not adding it to its whitelist until it reaches the stable development channel.

“We view the increased adoption of Chromium and WebRTC as positive for the entire Unified Communications industry,” a Google spokesperson explained. “With the recent release of developer previews for Edge, we are thrilled to be able to offer a new preview experience of Hangouts Meet, and we plan to officially support it once it becomes generally available.”
 

 

 

Fortunately, however, you can actually bypass Google’s restrictions quite easily, and it all comes down to changing the user agent in Microsoft Edge. In other words, you need to trick Google’s services believe you are using a different browser, like Google Chrome, which is already supported officially.

What you need to do is follow this path to change the user agent:

Microsoft Edge menu > More tools > Developer tools > More tools > Network conditions > User agent > Uncheck “Select automatically”

Next, you need to select the following entry as your new user agent:

Chrome - Windows

Refresh the page and now Google Meet should load correctly in Microsoft Edge browser.
 

 

 

As an alternative, you can turn to third-party extensions that take care of the whole thing for you, as it’s the case of User-Agent Switcher.

In this case, you need to install this extension, and then as your user agent, choose the following entry:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.86 Safari/537.36

Again, you need to refresh the page and the service, be it Google Docs or Google Meet, should load correctly.

Since Google says it would only add support for Microsoft Edge browser when the Chromium-based version is officially available for all devices, the restriction wouldn’t be lifted overnight, so you can turn to this trick at any point in the next few months.

Microsoft hasn’t offered an ETA regarding the official launch date of the new browser, and the company is still hard at work to improve the existing preview versions. A few more details should be shared next month at the Build developer conference, and the software firm is also believed to be working on the finishing touches for the preview builds aimed at Windows 7 and macOS.