Hacker News Reader

Usually "Request desktop site" means booting you back to the homepage of the desktop site.

No, that's not correct, at least in my experience. "Request desktop site" usually means "reload the same page, but send a User Agent string so the server thinks I'm calling from a full desktop browser". This works for websites where the server does some UA string sniffing and sends different html+assets for different types of devices.

The same works in reverse. In Chrome Dev Tools I can set the UA to iPhone/iPad/Android (http://imgur.com/mJY6lP6) and I should expect to see a mobile version of the site. Of course, with Responsive this does not work since responsive looks at screen size, not UA string.

For example, try changing your UA string in Chrome to iOS 6 and visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/

I mean literally if there's a button on the page that says "I want to see the desktop site". Those inevitably stink.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com