One of the many questions people seem to have about Netflix’s instant viewing feature is about support for other browsers and operating systems. There may not be a way to view instant viewing on a Mac yet (unless you run parallels or bootcamp) but there is a way to use instant viewing in firefox. Technically, it is just running Internet Explorer in a tab but at least you don’t have to open up a seperate window for IE.
1.) Install IE tab for Firefox - Download Here
2.) In the Menu bar in Firefox, go to Tools, then IE Tab Options
3.) In Sites Filter, add the URL http://*.netflix.com/*
4.) Push Ok
Congratulation, you are now able to view Netflix’s instant viewing content through Firefox. Anytime you go to the Netflix website, it will use the IE rendering engine to view the page.
Using IE tabs to view instant viewing content is unsupported by Netflix. Instant viewing is only supported with IE 6 or IE 7.
Filed under: Netflix Instant Viewing |

This isn’t really a good solution. I’m only able to access the internet via Firefox, IE is blocked. I get the block page when I try this.
Hopefully someone has a better solution.
There really isn’t any other solution until Netflix develops a player for Firefox. Instant viewing can only be run in IE6 or IE7 right now so if you can not run IE for some reason, you will just have to wait.
Great fix! IE sometimes doesn’t even run the instant watch natively very well, this works much better.
does instant viewing work with netscape browser or any others besides IE or firefox (with tab)?
I tried this but error message looking for javascript (which iis enabled) and ActiveX. I don’t have IE on my machine and don’t want it! Is there a fix for this ?
No you have to have IE. The Netflix movie viewer is an ActiveX Plugin.
actually… there’s a mozilla activex replacement of some sort… but i’ve no idea if it works for netflix. I’ve only used it so steam (counterstrike) can access the web content under linux.
I just purchased a new Apple running OS X and the fix is not compatible with my Operating System. It will only work for older versions as well as older versions of Firefox I think. This is a total bummer. IE is not supported on my system as well.
Any suggestions???
Awesome solution, thanks for putting up the guide.