I did something like this, though it wasn't public space exactly.
I had to live with a work VPN that routed all traffic for all RFC1918 addresses into the corporate network. Because we had acquired companies over the years with their own RFC1918 choices, and not all was integrated and renumbered.
Since I wanted to be able to reach my own home gear at times, I used 192.0.2.0/24 for my network. Not technically RFC1918, but not used in public, either.
I still remember the incredulity from one of my friends saying "but, but, you just took someone else's addresses?" and I said "sure, but whose? does it matter?" and then he looked it up on rwhois and started reading the company name... he got as far as 'Internet Corporation for Assigned...' and then he stopped and threw something at me. Ha!
There are a number of non-public but not commonly used address spaces out there, I suspect most of them would suffice for getting around Chrome's RFC1918 blocking. Though it's possible they have another heuristic for determine what constitutes a 'private' address that includes space other than the officially recognized RFC1918 subnets.
One thing I forgot to mention. Some consumer devices make assumptions about RFC1918 space, and will not operate if they think they're running on a public IP. This is what prompted me to switch back into RFC1918 for my home network (and I had long since left the company with the voracious VPN anyway). YMMV, of course, but it's something to keep in the back of your head if you plan to switch out of RFC1918 for your home network.
We ran into some of these different behaviors when we hit a Customer who was using the 192.9.0.0/24 network internally. (Then we hit a few more. Several police departments in Western Ohio are using that subnet internally for some reason. Some vendor in common must have come thru and done it.)
I had to live with a work VPN that routed all traffic for all RFC1918 addresses into the corporate network. Because we had acquired companies over the years with their own RFC1918 choices, and not all was integrated and renumbered.
Since I wanted to be able to reach my own home gear at times, I used 192.0.2.0/24 for my network. Not technically RFC1918, but not used in public, either.
I still remember the incredulity from one of my friends saying "but, but, you just took someone else's addresses?" and I said "sure, but whose? does it matter?" and then he looked it up on rwhois and started reading the company name... he got as far as 'Internet Corporation for Assigned...' and then he stopped and threw something at me. Ha!
There are a number of non-public but not commonly used address spaces out there, I suspect most of them would suffice for getting around Chrome's RFC1918 blocking. Though it's possible they have another heuristic for determine what constitutes a 'private' address that includes space other than the officially recognized RFC1918 subnets.