[SOLVED] Yahoo displaying as mobile version; how to fix?

[stevesr0]

Today, for no obvious reason, when I open Yahoo, it switches to the mobile URL and appearance. No other sites are doing this.

My User Agent String is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20140903 Firefox/24.0 Iceweasel/24.8.0

I believe that should "tell" Yahoo to display the desktop version..., but it no longer is.

Looked, haven't been able to find other people complaining about this, so it isn't obviously a change in Yahoo (but it might be).

Appreciate any thoughts about how to fix this.

Thanks,

Steve

[dasein]

In the future, you will save everyone (including yourself) a lot of time by checking the really obvious things first, and including them in your initial description of the problem. For instance:

Is the behavior specific to Iceweasel?
Does it happen if you start the browser in "safe mode"?

You get the idea.

[nixer]

Today, for no obvious reason, when I open Yahoo, it switches to the mobile URL and appearance. No other sites are doing this.

I too am having this problem. However, I am using the Palemoon browser, and it only happens to select yahoo pages, particularly the my.yahoo.com and the yahoo.com site. Actually it acts like a browser hijack in that my.yahoo.com goes to yahoo.com and displays the mobile version of yahoo.com. Other yahoo sites seem to be unaffected. Like you, I can't find much mentioned about this anywhere, but I wanted to let you know that you aren't alone.

The windows version works okay, it is only the linux version. I uninstalled completely and then reinstalled PM and it still shows the mobile version. This happens on both debian installs that I tested. I thought it might be a yahoo error that would be corrected in short order because it did the same for finance.yahoo.com, but it now works okay.

[dasein]

In case the OP doesn't know about UA spoofing..

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... -switcher/

For the OP and others who stumble on this thread, the key lesson here is that some Web sites try to figure out what version of the site to display (in this case, mobile-vs-desktop) based on the "User Agent" (UA) string reported by the browser (or any Web client).

The problem arises because Iceweasel is a really, really uncommon browser (<<1%), and lots (maybe even most) of site builders have never even heard of it. And there is a certain logic, from the site builders' perspective, to displaying the less demanding, less-glitz-burdened, mobile version to any unfamiliar UA. And that's what's happening here.

This issue also manifests itself sometimes as a site complaining that IW is "out of date" or "unsupported." Once again, the behavior is simply the result of the fact that IW doesn't present an exact match for any of the "known" UAs that the site has been programmed to recognize. Somewhere upwards of 99% of the folks who post here complaining that IW "doesn't work" on some-site-or-another are encountering a variation of this problem.

The workaround is to lie to the site about your UA, which is what the tool linked to above allows you to do.

[garbara]

I have been having this problem since the evening of 9/18. Thanks for the suggestion and link for changing the name of the user agent. It worked like as soon as I downloaded it. By the way I tried report this as a problem to Yahoo. After a 90 minute wait on a call to their help center followed by 4 emails exchanged over a 6 hour period they said Linux was not supported.

I also have a laptop running Linux Mint and it has the same problem with Yahoo.

[dasein]

Thanks for the suggestion and link for changing the name of the user agent.

And thank you for doing a search before posting another copy of the question. Much appreciated.

[stevesr0]

Thanks to all.

I used the user agent switcher program to change to MSIE 10.6 (the IE 10 choices were for Win 7 64 and didn't seem to take when I used the refresh test in the User Agent Switcher program), but IE 10 might have worked. IE 8 did not work completely - Yahoo opened a "basic" version with that User Agent choice.

Thanks to nixer for confirming the problem, to wizard10000 for suggesting IE 10 and to dasein for recommending the User Agent Switcher addon.

After I posted, I realized that the contacts in the mobile view didn't work very well either; that is normalized now.

I noticed that garbara telephoned Yahoo and eventually heard that Linux was not supported.

The one good thing about the mobile version is it provided ready access to e-mail Yahoo. Yahoo replied and I responded with more information and in their second reply, they said they had assigned an engineer to work on the problem. I suspect that the engineer will eventually determine that the problem is I use linux <g>.

Other note - there is a version selection (Desktop vs mobile), but mine was set to Desktop but displaying the mobile, so that was useless.

Thank goodness, it was fixable by adjusting the user agent string.

Steve

I will mark this solved.

[dasein]

I used the user agent switcher program to change to MSIE 10.6...

Identifying your UA as IE is going to fetch an IE-specific version of the page, which may have issues with Mozilla-based IW. A better choice would be a recent FF for Windows.

Glad you got it sorted out.

[stevesr0]

Addendum:

After using the IE 10.6 for a while, I tried adding a calendar item and got a tsk-tsk from Yahoo, that my browser had to be updated to use the desktop version of Yahoo Calendar.

After trying IE 11 with poor results, I switched to Firefox 28 and Calendar is happy .

So, that confirms dasein's comment.

Steve