My laptop thinks it’s a mobile
Firefox on my work laptop is experiencing somewhat of a personality crisis; whenever I visit a Yahoo! website (yahoo.com, yahoo.com.au, flickr.com) or PayPal I get the mobile version. While it has been a useful exercise in learning the ins and outs of some of the ‘biggest’ m-sites around, it’s actually really annoying. Update: I can now include WSJ.com (The Wall Street Journal) in this list since I can only see the mobile version of that site!
These sites obviously use some sort of user agent detection, but as far as I can tell my browser is reporting itself as it should be. I’ve tried several different user agent plugins to force it to report itself as Firefox for Windows, but it makes no difference. I’ve cleared all cookies, no effect.
The only other clue I have is that this all started happening after I used the .mobi emulator to test a few mobile websites. The emulator is just a Java applet, from memory, so it shouldn’t have such a lasting effect. Could it have somehow corrupted my browser?
So I hereby envoke the lazy web…does anyone know how to fix this? Please help :)
(yes I could just reinstall the browser but that’s no fun, and might not fix this issue anyway)
About the author
Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.
Comments
The first thing I would try is deleting the cookies that relate to these sites that are stuck in mobile land…
Any other ideas? I’ve already tried that :)
I see you’ve the Web Developer Toolbar installed. My guess is that you used it to display CSS for handheld devices and then forgot to turn that feature off. It doesn’t turn itself off when you refresh the page, as some other features do.
On the “CSS” dropdown list on the toolbar, point to “Display CSS by Media Type” and make sure there’s no tick beside “Handheld”.
Do I win free Steve Krug book? :)
Excellent suggestion Alan, sounds like you’ve encountered that problem before. Unfortunately for me, it’s not the cause of my issues. I hadn’t used the ‘by media type’ feature but for good measure I checked that it wasn’t set to mobile.
At any rate, if it was the cause, all websites would be displaying their mobile CSS, whereas my issue is only occurring with Yahoo, Flickr and PayPal.
While I was fiddling with the Web Developer Toolbar I decided to turn it and the Google toolbar off. No effect. Perhaps I should uninstall them altogether?
YAAAAAAAAAY! I have solved the problem! It was being caused by the wmlbrowser Firefox add-on. All I had to do was disable or uninstall it and I can now visit Flickr, Yahoo! etc and see the normal version.
I don’t know when that add-on was installed, possibly by a previous user on this machine, or possibly when I started using the .mobi emulator. Either way I hadn’t noticed it until this week. Such relief.
I have a similar problem.
I use a 3 3Gsim in my laptop when i have no other connection. When I use that connection i can only view mobile versions of the sites. is there anyway of disbaling this?
I used both firefox and ie7. Any help?
Sorry Raj, I have used a similar mobile broadband card to what you describe, but I never had any issues like this. Do you know if it’s a common problem? If it is there should be many people out there blogging, twittering or commenting on forums. It’s likely they have an explanation, if not a solution.
Yeah i beleive there would be many people but i’ve tried many key words and can’t find any blogs – the closest i found was yours.
I had the same problem for 2 months with my computer showing up as “www.m.yahoo.com” (the mobile version of Yahoo) and finally I deleted the cookies from Firefox and that fixed it. I never had the problem using Internet Explorer, only in Firefox. Hope that helps.
Thanks @Isaac, but my problem wasn’t caused by cookies but rather a Firefox plugin. Glad to hear you got your cookie problem sorted though.
Hi Guys,
I now have this problem using internet explorer – can’t seem to solve the problem at all. Ebay is the only website that where a mobile version is displayed. Yahoo is fine for the time being. Any suggestions? Rog
@Rog perhaps there’s a plugin for IE that’s similar to the “wmlbrowser” plugin for FF that caused my problem. Other than that, I don’t use IE enough to be able to diagnose the problem.
Genius solution – remove IE install FF. Worked first time!
YAY! Thank you all for this post. I was having similar problem and found the solution here. I uninstalled the wmlbrowser Firefox add-on. And so far the websites that were displaying mobile versions appear fine now. Thanks all…
What a relief!
Just found this post and I just removed the wmlbrowser” plugin… and Ho -la la!
Yahoo, and PayPal is working again as normal… no switching to Mobile version of the sites!
Thanks Pat for the fix… I am looking for this for months!
I have the same problem, but it’s not just yahoo or paypal, it’s all of my social network sites also (Facebook, Twitter, Formspring), and also photobucket. and they’re stuck in mobile and I don’t have the wmlbrowser plug in. I’m on an HPmini, so I don’t know if that has anything to do with it…
I have the same problem, only slightly stranger – the Google homepage is a regular desktop version, but the search results show up as the mobile version.
The only other site that i have this problem with is physorg.com .
What gives?
Erin and Josh, sorry guys can’t really help you. I only just managed to figure out the cause of my problem, but i’m sure there are many other reasons why the same or similar thing might be happening. It’s probably going to become a more regular occurrence now that mobile optimised sites are now very much expected.
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