845037 - Experimental - When in snapped view, allow users to use mobile website if available

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Metro Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Allison Naaktgeboren :ally]

One of my dogfooders has suggested that it would be really neat if snapped view automatically used mobile versions of sites. I think this is a pretty neat idea, as long as users can get to the full site[0], as sometimes mobile sites don't do what a user wants[1]. 

[0] maybe stick a button on the url bar to toggle between mobile/full
[1] as immortalized in http://xkcd.com/869/

Comment 1

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

What does this block?

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

This doesn't block any planned release.

Comment 3

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

I have a few thoughts about this idea:

1. It is difficult to meet user expectations with this type of feature. The simplest implementation will swap out the UA for a mobile UA. However, sites also use JavaScript for UA detection, feature detection, and responsive design. If you want a consistent experience, you'll need to figure out how to handle these cases.

2. We've been down a similar road with Firefox for Android, where we added a "Request Desktop Site" option. This has caused a number of problems related to #1. Mark Finkle had a good summary in bug 788921 comment 10. Site specific: bug 780998, bug 784144, General problems: bug 788921, bug 790210, bug 790954.

3. Firefox mobile browsers are often not recognized as mobile or Gecko cannot render mobile content due to WebKit specific feature usage. (We have a whole effort around improving mobile Web compatibility!) Given that we don't yet have a good story wrt content on mobile, forcing mobile content may not be the best idea at this point in time.

Comment 4

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Mass close of bugs in obsolete product https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350354