Why do popular sites not detect desktop browsers and redirect an m.* domain?
When browsing a "canonical" domain sites often detect a mobile browser by the User Agent header and redirect to m.* (such as m.facebook.com).
It'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.
But somehow sites (and again, I include Facebook as a prominent example) don't sniff the other way around when a user comes to their m.* domain from a desktop browser and don't redirect them to the canonical domain.
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.
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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Either way, as you mentioned, its a solution to a problem where the original solution itself wasn't great in the first place.
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.