Avoiding the Gotowebinar mandatory download

I sometimes attend webinars in my spare time, however with Gotowebinar there is a problem

If you attempt to attend the meeting a few hours ahead of the meeting starting, you get a web page asking you to come back at the meeting time.

If you come back at the meeting time, there is a mandatory download of an executable. Sadly in some locked down environments you can't do the download. You might not want to either, but since you've had no notice of a download being a requirement your chances of overcoming the security lockdown on your PC preventing downloads and getting this resolved before the meeting is over is probably nil.

So here is the simple solution:

Spoof your browser ident to make it look like you are running Linux or Chromium OS and then you can join instantly from your browser, just the way it should be.

Google "Chrome user agent" and you can get info on how to do this from the developer window, however if you can install extensions then install the UA spoofer and then right click on the icon to customise it

Add this setting

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 6457.94.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.114 Safari/537.36

and ensure it is marked Replace rather than Append and give it a meaningful name such as Chrome OS and a shortcut of COS.

You can then configure in the "permanent" settings gotowebinar.com to have a permanent override to invoke the COS ident string, thus your everyday browsing is unaffected.

One day Citrix will abandon the requirement for a download, Google hangouts which is free already have.

Craig