Originally Posted by adseguy
Safari IS the browser. Just like on a Mac. It doesn't need to mimic anything. The problem is on the web site administrators end. They programmed it so when someone looks at their webpage with the iPhone screen resolution it wants to optimize it for that. CNN purposely did this for iPhones and IMO most people hate it.
That is correct, however, it is the phones browser that sends the information to the website telling it that it is a mobile device, just like the PDA browser does on a Windows Mobile Device. There is a way on the Windows Mobile browser to change it so that when it accesses a site, it does not identify itself as coming from a mobile device and instead pretends to be a regular desktop computer. On the Windows devices it pretends to be Internet Explorer 6.0 so pages automatically display the page programmed by the web developer for that style of browser.
The same is true with the iPhone version of Safari. It identifies itself to CNN as a "Mobile" Safari and CNN responds by pushing the mobile site back. If there were an add on to the iPhone Safari browser that instead allowed it to identify itself as a desktop version of Safari, CNN would automatically display the regular full size page when the page request was received. The problem is not at the web site end, they configure the mobile pages for all mobile device users and there will be some iPhone users that do not wish to view the full size page. So the option on which page type you view should be on the phone end, not the website end.