
Why do popular sites not detect desktop browsers and redirect an m.* domain? - oferzelig
When browsing a &quot;canonical&quot; domain sites often detect a mobile browser by the User Agent header and redirect to m.*  (such as m.facebook.com).<p>It&#x27;s a bad habit to have 2 versions instead of one fully responsive one, but this is a question for another debate which has seen lots of discussion already.<p>But somehow sites (and again, I include Facebook as a prominent example) don&#x27;t sniff the other way around when a user comes to their m.* domain from a desktop browser and don&#x27;t redirect them to the canonical domain.<p>That results in people browsing these sites from mobile, sharing m.* links which people then open in their desktops and see a very weird mobile-oriented display.<p>My question is why do they not do that detection? is it pure negligence or is there something else behind it?
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nness
I would guess that, in most cases, a mobile-specific site accessed on a
desktop is still going to be far more usable than a desktop-specific site
accessed by mobile.

Either way, as you mentioned, its a solution to a problem where the original
solution itself wasn't great in the first place.

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oferzelig
I agree with your first sentence, but I'm not comparing which one is worse.
I'm just asking why do sites not redirect m.* addresses, when browsed from a
desktop browser, to the canonical domains.

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jklein11
One argument I could see is that the canonical url is ambiguous where the m.*
url is more likely to be intentional. If I am on my mobile phone, I will
probably type facebook.com into the address bar, because switching keyboard
context for the url would be more difficult. If I am on a desktop I am
unlikely to type in m.facebook.com, unless that is the url that I really want.

If you think about it this way maybe it would make sense to have a d.* and m.*
url. The URL without a suffix will remain the ambiguous case and you will be
redirected based on which platform you are on. If you would prefer a specific
version of the site, you could request it explicitly.

Maybe some type of prompt to easily switch versions if it recognizes a
url/platform mismatch would be helpful in the case of shares that you
described.

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schoen
A few people might have intentionally used the mobile version because it loads
faster for them or more readily presents the information they wanted. I'm not
sure I can think of a site that I currently use that way, but I think I've
seen people do it in the past.

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0942v8653
mbasic.facebook.com has been suggested for this use by several HN users.

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oferzelig
Very bad looking site and really unusable.

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schoen
Interesting contrast in the two replies that suggestion elicited!

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teslacar
good question ...it would be very easy to fix such a problem.

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oferzelig
Yeah, it's not even a fix - just implementation of something that is not
currently implemented.

