desktop site suddenly won't load on chrome for iPhone

November 1, 2015 4:33 AM

I can't get my phone (iPhone 6, iOS 9.1) to load the swagbucks.com desktop site in chrome. whether I request it on the site itself or using chrome's "request desktop site" button, it just keeps loading and reloading the mobile site.

this has been happening only for the past three days or so. I tried clearing cache/cookies/history, but no luck. what else I can try?
desktop site opens in safari, but I prefer chrome. other websites allow me to load the desktop sites. desktop site loads for other people on chrome for iPhone.

posted by sabh to Technology (3 answers total)

Unfortunately, there's no real good way to do this. It looks like it's styling the page via CSS media queries, which is based on the width of your browser. You can see this by loading the page on your desktop, and then dragging the browser window narrower. You'll see it pop to the mobile styling when the width of the window gets narrow enough.

However, there's kind of a hacky solution. You can run a bit of javascript that will force the "width" of your browser for just that page, and you can run it by typing it into the mobile browser's URL location bar. I went to swagbucks.com and (tediously) manually typed the following in my android browser URL bar:

javascript:document.querySelector('meta[name="viewport"]').setAttribute('content', 'width=1440')

and then the page updated to a zoomed out version of the desktop site.

However, it's something you'll have to run on every time you load a page (it doesn't "stick"). If you can make that text a bookmark, it might be a little bit more manageable. I believe you can do something like the instructions for installing this bookmarklet, and then at the last step, replace all the text with my text above. I haven't tried it, though.

Edit: try visiting this metafilter question on your phone, copying my code above, loading up swagbucks.com in your phone, and then pasting the code into the URL bar, (Make sure the whole thing is pasted, beginning with the "javascript:" - when I tried it just now, my phone "helpfully" removed that part, for my own safety), and submitting it. If it does work, you can try to figure out how to make it a bookmarklet from the link in my answer.
posted by losvedir at 5:25 AM on November 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

Did you install an ad blocker?
posted by wotsac at 6:51 AM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: just tried turning off the pop up blocker, but that didn't help.
posted by sabh at 12:03 PM on November 1, 2015