Why does Google Mobilizer no longer work on my phone?

May 24, 2009 5:46 PM

Why does Google Mobilizer no longer work on my smartphone? For a couple of years, visiting web pages via http://www.google.com/gwt/n stripped out most of the layout and all the images, making the sites load quickly. Now it seems to have no effect, as of about a week ago.

The weird thing is, if I try the mobilizer site on my laptop (Firefox) it still does what it's supposed to do. Only on my phone does it appear broken (Pocket IE on a T-Mobile dash).

I could only find one other reference to this issue, on a google forum.

posted by stupidsexyFlanders to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I have an app I run here every few days that relies heavily on GWT. I noticed things changed about 5~8 days ago, but not enough to upset my app, so I haven't investigated it - until now...

Looks as though if the requested page includes a <link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="http://blah.blah.blah" /> in the header, it redirects to that; if not, it works as before. I'd guess the sites you regularly visit have that in the header and it's redirecting rather than reformatting.

Never used to do that. I wonder what my app is seeing? ;-)
posted by Pinback at 12:27 AM on May 25, 2009