Desktop browsers in mobile mode

[giddyup69]

i tried searching but couldn't find any info. i bought the surface pro for my wife for work and she noticed something funny. some websites she visits say she has an incompatible browser.

i've looked at it and it seems she gets the message because the websites pick up the browser as a mobile browser. i'm not talking about the ie10 from the start menu either.. firefox and chrome are reporting the same issues straight from the desktop. has anyone else run into these problems and is there a way to fix this?

i guess an easy example to replicate is to run google maps and then try street view. doing this in firefox (for example) states that street view is unavailable in a brower that is in mobile mode or something similar to that. i ended up installing google mapsGL feature and that seemed to fix it. but other websites also render pages in funny mobile modes and some don't come up at all. i'm assuming there's a flag i need to change somewhere but i'm not techsavvy enough to figure it out.

 

[J515OP]

It sounds like the issue is in the FF settings. Have you gone into the browser and looked at the settings in there?

 

[cme4oil]

Works fine for me.... something in your settings.

 

[rotarydoc]

giddyup,

I have something along those lines, but no messages or errors.

I frequent Engadget.com and I have noticed that if I am in portrait mode, I get the mobile version of the site....and if I'm using the Surface Pro in landscape, I get the full site.

This is using the desktop version of I.E. 10....strange indeed...it will even change from mobile to the full site by rotating the tablet from portrait to landscape.

I haven't researched any other sites yet to see if I can duplicate it, but Engadget does it every time, it wasn't just a one time fluke.

It's not that big of a deal, just rather odd...maybe someone will figure it out at some point, I don't think it's in the settings in I.E. 10.

Glenn

 

[J515OP]

Maybe the website is picking up screen width some how and then severing a page based on that so it renders appropriately?

 

[ArnoldC]

These websites doesn't track IE 10 yet, it's that simple. Sometimes too, the User Agent string puts out Mozilla, like this-

Your User Agent String is:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; Trident/6.0)
Your IP Address: xxx

 

[rotarydoc]

These websites doesn't track IE 10 yet, it's that simple. Sometimes too, the User Agent string puts out Mozilla, like this-

Your User Agent String is:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; Trident/6.0)
Your IP Address: xxx

Both of those explanations make sense to me.

Thanks for the input, it is an early adopter issue, apparently. Like a lot of things with Windows 8 in general, I'm sure they'll get better with time....

Glenn

 

[giddyup69]

thanks for all the input.

i just assumed the tablet would behave like my desktop.. but yeah.. i'm assuming something is being triggered somewhere. the biggest problem was that some websites for her work don't seem to want to load. they say she's using an incompatible browser and to download ie9+, firefox or chrome in desktop mode.

reading arnoldc's comments above.. i did some searching and ended up changing the about:config in firefox. i changed the general.useragent.override setting to: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0

everything seems to be fine now.

got most of the info from here.. and it shows how to change the other browsers too: How to Change Your Browser?s User Agent Without Installing Any Extensions

the user agent setting i just pulled off my home computer's browser.

 

[marcux]

If you tether with an Iphone or andriod phone and you use the tether in stealth mode, it will send the server a reply from a mobile browser to hide your identity from your phone ISP.