CNN.com forces you to their mobile site

[ebrunn]

yahoo was doing this as well about two months ago.

[dsv4600]

add "index.html" to your bookmark address:

http://www.cnn.com/index.html

Does not redirect to the mobile site.

[mrmacbook]

my iPhone won't let me make a webclip of the CNN regular site.

[thesaint]

I am happy with the mobile site of CNN as it used to take looooong time to open the regular CNN.com using EDGE.

[joeg679]

Scroll to the bottom of the site and click on "regular site". This brings you to the regular site, like on a pc

[Griffinaz]

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.

[Youngbinks]

Another site that does this is aol.com. It's rather annoying and as of yet I've not found an easy way around it.

[Kaptain]

Bringing back an old thread...

Edit* this is happening with cbs sportslines website...

I was able to work around their mobile site by going directly to the specific sports links (used a search engine to do this)

Starting today it appears that its impossible to bypass the mobile site. The mobile site sucks! It's really limited and I cant get any of the stats that I want.

[Ramesh]

Bringing back an old thread...

Edit* this is happening with cbs sportslines website...

I was able to work around their mobile site by going directly to the specific sports links (used a search engine to do this)

Starting today it appears that its impossible to bypass the mobile site. The mobile site sucks! It's really limited and I cant get any of the stats that I want.

Sports Illustrated did that for about a week. I wrote an email to them stating how unhappy I was. At least ESPN give you the option to toggle wap/regular. I told them I wouldn't visit their site any longer until they fixed it.

They actually wrote me back and apologized, stating the site had gone back to regular. That was awesome.

[styfle]

And just to clarify to adseguy, mobile safari has a different string than it does on a mac or even a PC. Go here to show what your browser is sending to sites:
http://www.mensus.net/browser/info.shtml
Shows browser type, OS, layout engine, referrer, etc...