Thursday, December 20, 2018

4.4 kitkat - Is there any web browser that can display the desktop version of Gmail on an Android phone?



Is there any web browser that can display the desktop version of Gmail on an Android phone?



Answer



The stock browser and Chrome both seem to force you to use the mobile version of Gmail (selecting Desktop View or Request Desktop Site, respectively, simply reloads the mobile site), but in Firefox, if you select Request Desktop Site, you actually get the desktop version.




OP comment:


It seemed to work at first but then I realized the chart box doesn't work. It's there any way to make it work correctly?



Any time you request a desktop site in a mobile browser, there's a good chance that the rendering will be messed up or difficult to navigate, and some advanced features won't work. That's because you're (deliberately) requesting a version of the site that's not designed for the browser you're using.


There's not much tweaking you can do from the browser's end to "make it work correctly", because the problem is not that the browser is misbehaving, it's the the features were developed for desktop browsers and tested with desktop browsers. Any tweaking to make features work with a mobile browser would have to be done by the site developers.


But that's why there are different desktop and mobile versions: so that each version can be tailored to the behavior and feature sets of the browsers it's designed for, rather than having one version try to satisfy all types of browsers with the same code. And if a mobile site already exists, that's all the less of a reason for the developers to strive to make the desktop version mobile-friendly.


So, this is actually a different question. The answer to the question "is there any web browser that can display the desktop version of Gmail on an Android phone?", in the sense that it will do what you ask it to do and load the desktop version rather than forcing you to use the mobile site, is yes. Firefox will do that.


But the answer to whether you can make all features of the desktop site function correctly in a mobile browser, is that there's nothing any browser (mobile or desktop) can possibly do to force the design of a web site to conform to its own capabilities.


It's a similar situation to using Chrome or Firefox to browse a site that's designed exclusively for Internet Explorer, using some of IE's non-standard features. There's nothing you can configure in the browser to fix the fact that the developers implemented features it doesn't support.


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