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.
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.
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.
I 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.
