Ever wondered how to open mobile version of Facebook or YouTube or any other website on your desktop.
In this post, I am going to show you how you can easily open a Mobile version of any website.
Now, why would you want to do that
There can be many reasons for that. Like, if you are a blogger, who owns a website and wants to check whether the site opens correctly on Mobile or not.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post where I mentioned tricks to open Desktop version of websites on a Mobile phone. The trick is pretty useful to safely browse sites with heavy ads that start popping ads as soon as you land on them. Mostly the desktop versions are not that ad heavy.
How to open Mobile version of a website in Desktop?
So, let’s get started with this trick of opening a mobile version of a website on Desktop.
You might have noticed that when you open facebook.com on Desktop, it opens the complete website, and when you type facebook.con in your mobile browser, facebook gives you a mobile version automatically. You don’t have to type anything else other than facebook.com.
Same goes with any other website. So how does it know that which website version to serve?
Well, there is a thing called User-Agents, and every browser has that, and when you open a website, it sends some information back to the website, including which device is the browser installed on, what’s the screen resolution of the browser etc.
So, to open a mobile version of a website on a desktop. You have to trick the website into thinking that you are using a Mobile phone browser to open the website
How do you trick the website?
There is a chrome extension called User Agent Switcher for Chrome. You have to add it to chrome just like you add any other chrome extension.
Once it is added to the top right corner where other chrome extensions appear. You can click on it and select Android from the drop down.
Once you select the Android user agent, and load the website. You will see the website will open the mobile version of a website.
Pro tip: Sometimes you will land on a website that will only work in a specific browser. Like many Govt. sites still prefer (or work better) in Internet Explorer. So you can use this user agent switcher to trick them into thinking you are using Internet Explorer.
Hope you will find this useful. Don’t forget to share this article with others to let them know this trick. :-)