Question

My problem involved specifically firefox defaulting to mobile sites (but only certain mobile sites). Here is the fix that worked for me.

Answer 1

go into the: “about:config” area of Firefox (type into browser url, ok through warning).

Checked a couple hundred lines.. changed some to default values then I saw one stand out.

network.http.accept.default = “text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8,text/vnd.wap.wml;q=0.6”

The second I saw that wap.wml I knew we had a problem.. turns out via the firefox knowledge base that the q value sets the preference (0.0 lowest, 1.0 highest). When I clicked the reset button the value shot back to:

network.http.accept.default = “text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8

I didn’t look at the source code of the pages that I had problems with.. but 2 of them were: http://www.cnn.com and http://www.paypal.com (both of which shot me to m. version of the page).

after just recently working w/ some htaccess files. I realized that the coding in the htaccess (or in the site’s javascript, depending on how you do it) will detect what type of device your own. Some will work w/ your browsers/device. some will look for what your capabilities are. The problem I had as specified above is that my firefox said I was wap capable… some htaccess files say: if wap capable then go to mobile site. Others will say if browser/device = “” then go to mobile site. So really it’s how the company codes their backend.. The problem being is that the htaccess isn’t taking into consideration the weights of what type you prefer to accept.
anyways fixed and shared..