Re:User-agent string changes
by dubcanada on Saturday November 22, 2014 @01:59PM
(#8646315)
I disagree, there are instances where having a completely different website for a smaller form factor is beneficial to the user.
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It is! And I wish more sites would make it accessible like it used to be by just going to m.domain.tld rather than user-agent sniffing, because I often prefer the simpler mobile version I get when I spoof my user agent from the desktop.
Which is great.. until I do a google search for my closest movie theater on my phone to pull up the listings... the link to that theater's page is right at the top... "great" ... now I click the link and the site redirects me to m.theater.com/ (no path after the slash) ... now I'm stuck slogging through several pages to get to what I wanted.
This happens a lot.. there's a page on the desktop site that doesn't correspond. Responsive design still shoves a lot of extra resources at a client that the smaller devices especially don't need. Responsive rendering then loading an adaptive client in the browser is a better option... browser sniffing is the only way to do this.