Convincing a website I'm on a computer

Factual Questions
1

I’m finally getting an iPad. I’ll use it mostly for music (using an app that will show chords and lyrics). I’ve played with iPads before and one thing that always irks me is that it presents as an iOS or mobile device, so websites show up differently (in annoying ways).

For example, if I go to the ultimate-guitar.com website, it will constantly bug me to use their app instead, and certain functions (autoscroll) don’t work, while they work fine on a PC or Chromebook.

I know I can ask for the desktop version, but that doesn’t seem to fix the problem. I’ve fiddled with changing the user agent (I have to figure out how to do that again), but that didn’t change it either.

So, how can I browse to a website and make it really think I’m on a PC or Chromebook or Mac or anything other than an iPad or mobile device?

2

Am I crazy or did you ask this a few months ago?

3

Apparently so. I’m looking for more than just changing the user agent, now that I’m finally getting my own iPad – I would really like to get websites to give me the full desktop experience.

4

You probably don’t want / need to hear this, but an Android tablet has a desktop mode, which shows you websites as you’d see them on a PC.

5

I can’t use an Android tablet with my bandmates – they use OnSong, which is only on iOS. Believe me, I’d rather be using Android or ChromeOS, etc.

6

A quick google suggests that there are ways that an iPad can have a desktop mode.

7

Yeah, that all seems to be “request desktop site”, which doesn’t do it.

8

Two things:

  1. That website works just fine, auto scrolling, etc., on my Android phone in desktop mode.
  2. Good news! There’s a website, ultimate-tab.com, that scrapes tabs from ultimate-guitar and allows auto-scrolling, transposing, etc., right in the iPad browser. So, that solves the immediate problem!

I would still love to be able to be really in desktop mode, not faux-desktop, but I’m probably fine for now.

9

I have a similar problem, but on an Android Samsung phone and tablet. One time I went to the Target app to order something using my wife’s account. Now when I go to the Target web page, on either my phone or tablet, it kicks me to the Target app. The downside is the app thinks I’m using my wife’s account, and wants her password. I can’t just to to the website for Target without it opening the app. And there’s no way to log out of her user account without first logging in. Bad design!

(I know that I could just delete the cached memory for the app, but you’d think there’s another way.)

10

I can’t test anything as I have children and my own personal iPad is somewhere in the house, but make sure you don’t just use Safari, but try Chrome and especially Firefox.

11

I’ve tried Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Opera at least. Arc won’t install on the old one.

Opera really looked promising, but no luck.

For the Target app, yeah, delete the memory, I guess. Are you in Request Desktop?

12

So basically there are only 3 web browsers now:

Safari or WebKit

Firefox or Gecko, it has a few forks, none of huge popularity

Chrome or Chromium. Brave, Opera, and many, many more are this. So I think you can stop trying new browsers, I don’t think they will give different results than Chrome proper.

13

I’ve tried to convince websites I’m a computer. They all say I’m Cray-Cray.

14

Please check all the tiles with bridges.

15

I couldn’t. None of them were named Jeff.

16

What ever you say, Lloyd.

17

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up making bad jokes.

18

Could this just be a viewport width thing (how wide your browser window is)? Like if you rotate the iPad to landscape, and possibly go to 50% or 75% zoom in the browser, does it make a difference at all?

19

I don’t see how - when I browse on an actual computer, sometimes the window is just a portion of the screen.

20

Well, sure, but even on a computer, if you shrink the window narrow enough, it’ll often switch to mobile mode even on the computer. Like on the SDMB, if you make the window really narrow, the layout will change slightly (some icons will disappear, some columns will instead be new sections at the bottom of the page). If you really wanna know, it’s called a CSS media query; it can vary webpage layouts depending on your current window/screen width and orientation.

But that’s just one of the detections that sites can use. Rotating the tablet and/or changing the zoom is an easy way to test that.

In the specific case of the utimate-guitar site, however, it seems like they are instead detecting the presence/absence of the “mobile” keyword in the user agent string to choose between mobile and desktop layout rather than the viewport size in particular. Not sure about autoscroll, though. What is that exactly and where do you see it?

(I’m a web developer and you’ve got me curious about this now… would love to dig a bit for fun.)