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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Facebook aside, don't the majority of sites show you mobile version by looking at headers. Isn't that the whole reason the "Show desktop version" feature even exists in Chrome, to send the desktop header? Very few sites actually use www. vs m.

Clearly, in those cases, people aren't "confused" by the fact that they are seeing a mobile version on www., so other than the fact that you're used to Facebook specifically working this way, wouldn't you just send the Desktop header whenever you get mobile and want desktop?

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Just speaking for myself, but often people will link to mobile Wikipedia pages, or mobile versions of other sites, and I'll look at the URL first to see if I can change it to a desktop version.

The fact that you have to even do that shows that the m. pattern is bad. The same url should be shareable without having to worry about such things. It should show as mobile on mobile and desktop on desktop, unless you specifically tell it not to.

> Isn't that the whole reason the "Show desktop version" feature even exists in Chrome, to send the desktop header?

This is indeed what it does; I wish it did more!

Specifically, when visiting responsive pages on a phone where the mobile-viewport-size layout is just 100% broken, I’d love if “Request Desktop Site” actually set the viewport to be that of a desktop browser, and then set a low CSS/viewport zoom level to compensate. I want the dual of what happens when I set the “simulate a phone of X size” option in Chrome’s inspector!

I have a bookmarklet to specifically add/edit the <meta> tag on the page to change the viewport width to 1200px.

Works in many cases, although there still are sites that break with this. I have seen sites that uses the value of window.innerWidth at load and never bother listening for changes in the width. I have seen sites that uses the presence of onTouchMove event to determine whether to use a mobile layout.

I'm pretty sure Chrome's "request desktop site" option does change the viewport size. Or if it's doing something else, it has the same effect.

Have you tried it in the last couple months? It seems like a fairly recent change in behaviour.

Modern websites use the screen width to show you mobile vs desktop view. But before CSS had good support for responsive web design everyone had to create a separate website for mobile and put it on m.website

I don't get what you mean, I'm talking about opening an "m.facebook.com" link on my desktop computer Chrome. So not sure why "Show desktop version" is relevant.

>Very few sites actually use www. vs m.

Well, facebook does that.

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