TipBITS: How to Load Desktop Web Sites and Pages Without Content Blockers in iOS

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/08/09/tipbits-how-to-load-desktop-web-sites-and-pages-without-content-blockers-in-ios/

Now and then, when you’re browsing the Web in Safari in iOS, you might want to load the desktop version of a site or reload a page without your content blocker enabled. Here’s how to do that, but beware that it may not work as desired.

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Thanks Adam.

Or, you can use Firefox or Google and not waste your time fiddling with Safari.

(Safari still has the best interface.)
(Why can’t it still resize the text though!? Like on Amazon. It’s been eight years…)

Thanks, this was useful, I’d no idea.

Alas, it’s pretty hard to avoid Safari in iOS since you can’t set another browser as the default.

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Just don’t click on it. Put the icon in the folder with the other crap and put chrome or Firefox in a prominent place.

What Adam is getting at is that even if you do something like that, any link you tap on or any app that wants to forward you to a web page will end up opening Safari. Unlike macOS, iOS does not offer any option to chose another default web browser. So no matter where you hide the app, you will always end up in it somehow.

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You copy the web address and paste it into the address bar of Firefox or Chrome. You can even type what you think might be the address into Chrome or Firefox and they will likely figure it out. Don’t use Safari to go to a web page. Don’t use Safari at all.

You can try to avoid Safari at all times, but that requires a lot more work (and ignoring things like Siri searches) for very little gain. It’s hard to get excited about different browsers in iOS since they’re all using WebKit and just aren’t very different.

It’s easy to get excited about other browsers that have better UI/UX. Just because they use the same render engine doesn’t make them the same experience. And the only reason they use the same render engine is because Apple requires it.

One of my pet peeves is Apple refusing to allow default apps. In my case it make email impossible to use efficiently on my phone because iOS Mail.app and my gmail account for some reason refuse to work together.

I keep Chrome, Safari, and Firefox launched on my Mac all the time because there are times when it’s useful to switch to a different one. That just doesn’t seem to come up for me in iOS. I have Chrome loaded, but basically use it only when a Google app launches it instead of Safari.

Regardless, let’s stop all the whining. The article was about a legitimately useful feature in Safari and there’s no reason to use it as an excuse to complain. It’s hard to get excited about sharing practical information about the technology we all use when all it does is engender negativity.

It’s an incredibly useful tip, and I’m happy to know it. What I can’t figure out is how anybody is supposed to discover that sort of functionality. This is precisely why I have subscribed to Tidbits for years.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Mail not working well with Gmail

Nice tip. I have gotten so out of touch with the new features of IOS.

However, when you say “Web designers sometimes hide content or even remove functionality, reasoning that it’s too difficult to provide a usable interface in such a small space. Most of the time, that’s a good call.” that is not necessarily so. I do mostly simple responsive websites with the exact same content for all devices. It is good for my readers, plus being easy and clean. Websites, IMHO, try to do too much, where simple is good enough. Simple website design loads pages faster and provides better security by using flat files rather than data bases. They are also easy to update and maintain if you use a static site generator such as Jekyll or Hugo or Templar. Thanks for all of your good work.

Of course, hence my waffling words of “sometimes” and “Most of the time.” There are lots of reasons this happens, and some cases, like yours, the same content can appear on all screen sizes without compromise.

Anyone who states absolutes is wrong. :slight_smile:

It’s great that so many people are discovering this functionality for the first time (thanks, Adam), but the “request desktop site” was added with iOS 8 in 2014, and content blockers with iOS 9, so these are not brand new features.

Which was never said, or even implied, in the article. :slight_smile:

But if someone didn’t know about the feature, it will be new to them, and our goal is to impart useful information, not break news or unearth hitherto unknown features (of which there are likely very few, given how much information appears on the Internet these days).

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