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by blakesterz 2721 days ago
How to request the desktop version of a website in mobile Safari...

Visit the affected site in Safari.

Tap and hold the Refresh button in the URL bar.

Tap Request Desktop Site.

The website will then reload as its desktop version.

2 comments

That’s not what they referred to. That’s still loading the built in version of WebKit. On Android for example I can download Firefox and Chrome and they run on their own rendering engines.
They said both: "no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit"

It has view as desktop, it doesn't have alternatives to webkit.

It doesn't work for many responsive websites since you can't spoof your screen metrics.
True, but that's more of a problem with Safari than WebKit. Here's Gmail's desktop interface zoomed way out in an iPad sidebar using iCab's desktop mode: https://i.imgur.com/Qr56fYx.png

You can force it to always allow zooming, block App Store links, spoof other user agents (Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, Googlebot, etc), download and upload files, and do all sorts of other stuff that Safari doesn't support.

User interface is admittedly more crowded so it's not my daily driver, but it's handy to keep around.

In many cases I found that this doesn’t seem to work. For example, reddit.com will only load the mobile version.