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The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting t
by dripton 11mo ago
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
- reaperducer 11mo agothere should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. Apple has started down this road. All iPads now use desktop user agents.
- janwl 11mo agoThe phone vendors want you downloading and using apps.
- SllX 11mo agoYep! The dickbar in Apple's iPhone Safari app to install an app for the website I'm currently viewing is one of the reasons I no longer use Safari on my iPhone. The fact that there's not even a setting to turn that off is grating, because I have increasingly found that for a lot of websites, given a choice between the website and the app, I vastly prefer the website. Not always, sometimes I prefer the app, but there are some really shitty apps trying to pass themselves off as website replacements. Also Wikipedia. I don't remember if I particularly disliked the first-party app, but I vastly prefer Wikipedia in a web browser.
- MerlinDE 11mo agoThere are several useful apps available for iOS that work as Safari extensions handling that kind of stuff. Banish is very useful, as well as Hush. In addition Opener allows you to chose if links shall open the respective app or just stay in the browser.
- SllX 11mo agoI appreciate your input and if that were the sole reason I switched browsers that might be enough, but how unreasonable is it that you have to get a 3rd party extension from the App Store to turn off an annoyance that Apple clearly thinks is a feature? Like if they’re going to retain the dickbar, it should be a checkbox in Safari’s settings to turn it off.
- reaperducer 11mo agoAlso Wikipedia It's 13:41 on Tuesday, October 14 - Don't forget to give us money!
- ksymph 11mo agoMost browser apps have an option for this, no? Chrome and Vivaldi have it for sure.
- cm2012 11mo agoYes, I use chrome desktop on my phone all the time to browse reddit.
- stronglikedan 11mo agoI hope for the sake of UX that you're browsing old.reddit that way.
- swiftcoder 11mo agoThey do, but a bunch of sites fingerprint you as mobile anyway, and continue to serve the mobile UX
- badc0ffee 11mo agoSafari has this setting, but the half dozen times I've tried it, it doesn't work. I suspect you're right that it's because sites just look at the resolution.
- slumberlust 11mo agoYou can see results of fingerprinting here: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
- musicale 11mo agoThe war on web users is ugly. Surely you don't mean to block our popups, right? Surely you didn't mean to block our auto-playing video, right? Surely you would rather use our lousy app rather than the desktop web site you explicitly requested, right? etc.
- crooked-v 11mo agoThat's because trying to detect desktop/mobile is itself gross and hacky, as well as hard to work with as a dev. Just doing resolution-based stuff is easier, more reliable, and usually a better experience when devs aren't lazy enough to just leave things out in the smaller views.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. The browser vendors already do. What do you want to change?
- dripton 11mo agoI'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.
- techdmn 11mo agoIt's almost like one of the leading browser developers is also in the advertising business. (To be clear I completely agree, fingerprinting is evil.)
- SamBam 11mo agoPresumably better spoofing, so the websites can't tell from obvious tells like resolution. Firefox on Android seems pretty good on desktop-mode, though: its resolution seems desktop-like, and sites rarely give me the mobile treatment.
- xandrius 11mo agoYou mean Desktop view? Which exists on every browser? If you want full fooling, install a UA changer on your Firefox mobile, and you're laughing.
- jakub_g 11mo agoOn Android at least, you can toggle "desktop view" in any browser. The UX is crap on some websites, but you can make things work enough to not need the app. For example I use Opera to browse `facebook.com/messages`. It's a bad UX for writing (somehow it "swallows" some of the written text when you type too fast, or select text and try to overwrite it), but this makes me use it less. Won't ever install FB app on my phone.
- Andrex 11mo agoFor the first time ever I ran into a web app blocking Desktop Mode on Chrome for Android somehow. (ChowNow) I've seen sites detect it but issue a warning, but this was a full functionality-block. I was literally using it fine one day, then the next they started saying I need to use the desktop website for menu editing as it's "more optimized." Dinguses, if I'm manually turning on Desktop Mode I know it's not gonna be "optimized." Just let me get my menu edits pushed goddamnit!
- joquarky 11mo agoThat sounds like an accessibility issue. Especially if viewport scaling is disabled. People with vision impairments need to be able to zoom.