On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Tomasz Finc <tf...@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/43d566ca1333234e?pli=1 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?) -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
