Every site I go to switches me to annoying "mobile view" mose

[jpinard]

How do I stop this? I went to all these tech sites and all their text and windows are tiny little windows on the far left of the screen. How can I stop this? This is on my main computer.

[Armando Penblade]

Sounds like your user-agent got fubar'ed. What browser/version are you using, and have you recently added an extension/addon that might fudge with your user-agent to get around website limitations, or done any other update?

[chequers]

You either have set a tiny default zoom level, or your user-agent has been molested as per above.

[jpinard]

I'm using IE8, without non-standard addons. What user-agent are you referring to?

[Charlatan]

about user agents (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/02/21/the-internet-explorer-8-user-agent-string.aspx).

Well, this article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503.aspx) is probably better at explaining it.

Basically it's the part of your browser that identifes what browser it is. If it somehow got set to "mobile internet" or some such nonsense, then every website you go to will think you're viewing it on a mobile phone, and many will rearrange their content.

Copy and paste this string into your address bar and see what your browser is reporting itself as:


javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

[jpinard]

about user agents (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/02/21/the-internet-explorer-8-user-agent-string.aspx).

Well, this article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503.aspx) is probably better at explaining it.

Basically it's the part of your browser that identifes what browser it is. If it somehow got set to "mobile internet" or some such nonsense, then every website you go to will think you're viewing it on a mobile phone, and many will rearrange their content.

Copy and paste this string into your address bar and see what your browser is reporting itself as:


javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

This is what I see:
http://www.jeffpinard.com/IE.png

Perfect example is if I go directly to LG's site, it auto-switches from:

http://www.lg.com
to
http://msa.lge.com/index

[chequers]

That UA is fine. What happens with another browser?

[rei]

stop it, don't use ie8. :) use chrome.

[Armando Penblade]

Are you maybe tethering through a wireless phone or cellular card? I suppose it's possible some sites might be doing mobile-forwarding based on IP, as well (some sites do have to do this to ensure mobile users don't get to their real versions by switching user-agents, because some sites are run by fuckers who should burn in hell forever).

But I imagine that would be a pretty small subset of websites. But it's a thought at least.

[jpinard]

I just have all my devices on a wired home network tied together with a LinkSys Router.