Comment by dripton
1 day 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.
On 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.
For 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!
Safari 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.
The 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.
You can see results of fingerprinting here: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
That'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.
You 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.
Most browser apps have an option for this, no? Chrome and Vivaldi have it for sure.
They do, but a bunch of sites fingerprint you as mobile anyway, and continue to serve the mobile UX
Yes, I use chrome desktop on my phone all the time to browse reddit.
I hope for the sake of UX that you're browsing old.reddit that way.
The phone vendors want you downloading and using apps.
Yep! 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.
There 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.
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Also Wikipedia
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there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop.
Apple has started down this road. All iPads now use desktop user agents.
> The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile.
The browser vendors already do. What do you want to change?
Presumably 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.
I'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.
It's almost like one of the leading browser developers is also in the advertising business. (To be clear I completely agree, fingerprinting is evil.)