Force webview to display desktop sites

Question

I have the below webview client which sets the user agent to a desktop browser when we are viewing a page that does not contain the word google in the URL. (Also does other stuff but that all works fine).

 webView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
                @Override
                public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
                     if (!url.contains("google")) {
                        String newUA= "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0";
                        webView.getSettings().setUserAgentString(newUA);
                         view.loadUrl(url);  
                     }else {
                            webView.getSettings().setUserAgentString(null);
                            view.loadUrl(url);  
                     }
                    return true;
                }
                public void onPageStarted(WebView view, String url, Bitmap favicon)
                {
                    super.onPageStarted(view, url, favicon);
                    progressBar.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
                }
                public void onPageFinished(WebView view, String url) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
                    super.onPageFinished(view, url);
                    String page = webView.getUrl();
                    if (!(page.contains("google"))){
                        grabit.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);

                    }else{
                        grabit.setVisibility(View.GONE);

                    }
                    webView.loadUrl("javascript: function loadScript(scriptURL) { var scriptElem = document.createElement('SCRIPT'); scriptElem.setAttribute('language', 'JavaScript'); scriptElem.setAttribute('src', scriptURL); document.body.appendChild(scriptElem);} loadScript('"+CFG.Bookmarklet+"');");
                    progressBar.setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE);
                    if (webView.canGoBack()){
                        left.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_arrowleft);
                    }else{
                        left.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_arrowleft_gray);
                    }
                    if (webView.canGoForward()){
                        right.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_arrowright);
                    }else{
                        right.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_arrowright_gray);
                    }

                }
            });

This issue with this is that while on some sites it works perfectly others it does not work and on some it seems to just change the view port. A few examples are:

> Argos - shows mobile
> Tesco - shows mobile but view port has changed 
> Amazon - works 
> John Lewis - shows mobile but view port has changes
> Play.com - works

So is there something I am missing? Another way the websites it does not work on are checking the browser to decide what to display?

It would seem that the 'show desktop version' in Chrome works fine for these sites.. so prehaps chrome does something else to?

Thanks

Please check open http://myhttp.info with your webview and check if there is something suspicous — Caner, Nov 13 '13 at 12:44
Some websites check the screen size of the device viewing the site and decide to show a mobile site or desktop site based on that, instead of solely relying on the user-agent string. — anthonycr, Nov 13 '13 at 21:13
@A.C.R.Development would there be a way to fake a normal desktop screen size do you think? — DevWithZachary, Nov 13 '13 at 21:52

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 30 '16 at 17:35

3

You can use setDesktopMode(true) from this WebView subclass or read how it's implemented in detail.

This way, you don't have to set a fixed user-agent string. Moreover, setting the user-agent string only is usually not enough. It depends on the site, of course, since every website uses their own way of determining whether the client is on mobile or desktop.

answered Mar 30 '16 at 17:35

caw

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The library you mentioned uses the same behavior by resetting the usedagent what is the difference ?? – Simon K. Gerges Apr 06 '16 at 05:44
2

@SimonKarmy No, as you can see, that's not all it does. First, it doesn't set the user-agent string to a fixed and pre-defined string which would distort the actual value for many devices. Second, it does also adjust the viewport and zoom settings. Third, it offers a way to revert the settings. – caw Apr 06 '16 at 18:58

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 17 '13 at 00:14

1

You Can try this

webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
webview.getSettings().setUserAgentString("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0");

answered Dec 17 '13 at 00:14

Simon K. Gerges

3,097
36
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@simon Hi i tried this same first time the desktop site is loading but second time onwards webview redirect to other site (mobile site) – Vignesh Dec 27 '17 at 19:10

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 10 '20 at 16:03

The only solution which worked for me (javascript will be executed many times, but this is the only working solution for now)

@Override
public void onLoadResource(WebView view, String url) {
       super.onLoadResource(view, url);
       view.evaluateJavascript("document.querySelector('meta[name=\"viewport\"]').setAttribute('content', 'width=1024px, initial-scale=' + (document.documentElement.clientWidth / 1024));", null);
}

You can set desktop UA string too

webView.getSettings().setUserAgentString("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36");

Force webview to display desktop sites

3 Answers3

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