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On Chrome for Android, a website may not always be laid out properly or in a way that will give you the best viewing experience where you can get all of the information you need. To resolve this, Google has always had a ‘Desktop site’ toggle in the three dots ‘more’ menu at the top of the browser. Unfortunately, if you are on a tablet and prefer the desktop view over the mobile one every time, you’d have to manually toggle this setting…every time.
A new Chromium Repository first discovered by our friend Leopeva64-2 over on Reddit reveals that the Chrome dev team is working to make a sort of ‘Show desktop site as default’ option that would be applied globally across all sites you visit. This nomenclature is used by Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser right now, which recently created a similar toggle, but should Chrome implement it, it would be called ‘Always request desktop site’ or ‘Always request mobile site’.
This would drastically cut out the amount of work the user would have had to do in order to get a decent experience on larger Android screens, so it would be a welcome change if it comes to be. Of course, with all things in development, it could get chopped before it gets released, but with something this important, and with similar plans for this appearing in the past, I have little doubt that this will eventually see the light of day.
According to the commit patch, you would be able to switch the option via the ‘Site settings’ section. My guess is that the ‘Desktop site’ check box in the browser top-level menu will remain and the ‘Always request’ choice would stay buried for more advanced or adamant users.
Changing the visual layout of a webpage on my phone or any smaller device is something I’ve rarely, if ever, done. I’m curious to hear how many of you make use of this kind of thing and how often. Furthermore, I’d love to hear in the comments whether or not you’d want a global switch for desktop mode on Chrome for Android. I think that it’s a useful tool to have, especially since many developers still force tablets to use their website’s mobile layout when they should be defaulting them to the full experience.
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