Non mobile version of site on Kindle Fire only

Hey guys,

Ever since the relaunch I've been unable to view the site's "mobile" version on my Kindle Fire (1st gen, Silk browser). It will only show the full size version which is not an optimal experience. If I remember correctly seaserpent worked just fine on my Fire when it was in beta. Anyone else have this problem?

Same here, using Dolphin browser v 8.7.0

Trust me the mobile site is broken as hell, you want the normal site. The normal site works fine on my Nexus 7 though.

@alexw00d: Yeah, I understand the mobile site is fucked right now, trying to use it with a non-stock (Maxthon Mobile) browser right now. It looks fine, but videos and everything are broken. But it is an absolute pain in the ass to navigate the full site on a 7 inch tablet.

In any case, hopefully Top Men are back from the long weekend to fix some of this stuff.

not to be all 'me too', but I'm seeing the same thing. the 3rd party Maxthon browser seems to work, and switch between desktop/online style when I rotate the fire, but the built in browser seems to treat things as if I'm just zooming my view in or out, not actually changing size/orientation/etc.

The new site is entirely adaptive - there is no "mobile" site per-say. Try shrinking the size of your desktop browser. You can watch all the adjustments get made to the layout as the width shifts.

I don't have access to a Kindle Fire to test it, but I assume it is looking at your screen width and assuming your screen is big enough for the main site (rather than squeezing it down for a smaller format). That's what happens on my iPad Mini.

In addition to simply changing the layout based on viewport width, they're also doing user agent sniffing to turn off things like the WYSIWYG editor. And some other weird stuff it seems. I have heard from some Nexus 7 users that the mobile layout only shows if they "request desktop site", an action that merely changes the user agent string. It makes no sense at all that this would affect the layout, but that's what it seems happening.

Short answer. We currently detect the smaller tablets as full size tablets.

As @lordandrew says we do both user agent sniffing and device width css responsiveness. At the most basic level the css is device width dependent. When you resize your desktop window you can actually see the different breaks where the layout changes based solely on width. We then also have a device test which does things like turn off the WYSIWYG editor and in the case of tables set the meta device width tag to force the width of the devices to 980 pixels wide. Not an uncommon thing to do and it is the view which the iPad uses on sites which are not responsive anyhow.

We did this because we felt that the 980 wide view of the site looked much better on the iPad and other large tablets in both horizontal and vertical orientation. The Fire, iPad Mini and the Nexus 7 are in that odd small tablet size. We would need to do one extra check for these tablets as well and give maybe the 768 width size. From a very small sample of people with these smaller devices they all preferred the wider view on the small tablets anyhow. Not saying it is not doable but we are a little stretched as it is to add one more layer.