A product idea

5 points·slash-dot··3 comments

I was linking a book from amazon to my friend, but since I was on my mobile the link was "broken" and linked to the mobile version of the site. This isn't the first time this has happened to me so it got me thinking if there was anyone working on this problem. On some sites it's even worse where if you click on a mobile link on a desktop browser it redirects to the front page of the main site. How could this be solved?

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> How could this be solved?

It can be solved by firing incompetent developers. And promoting this video http://www.organizedwonder.com/videos/1400

On a software level, you can switch the browser's user agent to desktop, at least on Android. Doesn't solve the root problem, but you can use it as a workaround when you're in need.

Fortunately due to advances in mobile technology this could be a thing of the past in the near future, back before 3G there was a real need for low-bandwidth sites and hence mobile specific versions of the site. Now we have devices with larger screens, faster processors (which often now include GPUs almost as standard) and proper browsers that support much of what their desktop equivalents do. Give it a few years and hopefully more web developers will see the importance of flexible design for their webpages, that is if the App craze doesn't kill this off.

Seems like a problem to be solved by a URL shortener. `t.co` is only nearly every tweet, and they could implement this to check the browser on the `GET` request, and modify the expanded URL on the fly.

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