How To – Permanently Have Desktop Mode on Chrome Mobile for Android

If there’s one thing about Chrome for Android that I despise, it’s the lack of being able to permanently set the browser to desktop mode when browsing on our tablet or large phone. Data plans and larger screens allow for us to emulate carrying around a desktop, and it should provide us with a desktop experience without having to muck about with loading the mobile one first. Thanks to Google and it’s fantastic ability to search everywhere at once, we were lucky enough to stumble upon a solution on the Google Chrome Forum.

Launching chrome with a command line flag telling it to use a desktop user agent is simple and only requires pushing one file to a root directory – meaning that you’re going to need to be rooted. Simply grab the file from the link provided below and drop it into /data/local/ while settings the permissions to 755. This tells Chrome that it needs to run using a desktop user agent and therefor loading desktop sites no matter what; you are also able to replace the user agent inside the quotes with any from this site ( or any that you can find on the web ) to have your tablet display a tablet-like interface if you went with the iPad UA for example. Grab the file from below and drop it in to let us know how it goes. It’s worked on all of our devices so far running both ICS and JB.

Still skeptical or want a video walkthrough?

Heads up:

If the file downloads anything other than a blank file (eg: chrome-command-line.txt, chrome-command-line.bin) then rename it to only “chrome-command-line” and paste it in the correct location. 

ADB Instructions (for non-rooted devices)

Place the file in the root directory of your PC and make sure your device is connected to your computer. When connected, issue this command:

adb push /chrome-command-line /data/local/chrome-command-line

You can also set the path on your computer where the file is located by replacing the first ‘/chrome-command-line’ with the file location.

Source: Chrome Forums