On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Tomasz Finc
<tfinc(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Firefox is tough as the current version has the
exact same UA on
mobile phones AND tablets. And since we don't redirect tablets we
haven't switched it over yet.
Anyone know why they did that?
Mozilla generally recommends using CSS media queries and other client-side
techs for adapting your pages to small or large screened-devices; while this
is generally a good idea, it doesn't help directly with an issue like this
where we'd really prefer to know a binary "device claiming to have a tiny
freaky screen" or "anything else" so we can divide people down the
mobile-optimized or regular web site paths. (We need to support older/more
primitive phones that don't handle any of this stuff.)
There are a couple closed-with-extreme-prejudice bugzilla entries like this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625238
https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_thread/thread/4…
which mostly look like they're about wanting / not wanting whole gobs of
device data in the user-agent string.
All *we* really want is "are you a small screen -> include 'Mobile' in
the
UA" or "otherwise -> don't include 'Mobile' in the UA"...
it may or may not
be worth seeing if that can get added in as a compatibility thing, however
I'm not sure offhand how easy it actually would be to detect whether such a
flag should be added or not.
I know that iOS has an explicit way to find out whether the app is running
in the phone-style UI (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPhone-targeted apps running
on iPad in compat mode) or the tablet-style UI (iPad). I don't know if
there's an equivalent on Android.
An alternative if that can't be shoehorned in upstream is to do a
JavaScript-side check while loading the regular web view; if we're in a
browser where CSS media queries detect a tiny mobile screen, and we don't
have a redirect preference cookie, then do the redirection after the fact.
(And optionally set a default state for the per-browser preference cookie so
we only have to do the test once instead of every visit?)
I like this idea and think that we could implement it well.
Also, this seems like it would be a good solution moving forward.
As, it would just continue to work without the need to constantly
update UA detection, etc.
-- brion
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