Mobile Web Browsing - Browsing
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It's time to fire up the browser, but where do you go from there? It will work very similar to the way your desktop browser works. There are favorites, home pages and address bars.
There are a few different things that can happen once you hit that GO button. The first thing is that the browser grabs the site you typed in. This is probably the most common thing that will happen. But depending on the layout and coding of the website, what happens next will vary. Chances are that the site wasn't developed for smart phones, and viewing it may be troublesome. I have seen some normal web pages that load and are manageable and some that crash my browser. A lot of sites will load, but just not look anything like they would on your computer. You will have a lot of scrolling to do, and the site might not ever finish loading due to some code your browser doesn't like.
The other possibility is that it will load a slightly different web page with which you aren't familiar. This is probably a site that is smart phone friendly. They usually have a basic layout without many pictures. These pages, developed for mobile devices, typically still have all the content that you want, but without the fancy programming and multimedia enriched parts. If you're lucky, they didn't even bother to put in the ads if they have any on their main site.
How does the website know to display the full-featured version on your desktop and the mobile version on your phone? You can thank your browser. When your computer or phone goes out to the server to grab the web page, it brings with it the browser it is running. If the server detects a desktop browser, it will send the normal page. If it detects a mobile browser, it will send the mobile version of the page.
What if the page you want to view doesn't have a mobile page that automatically comes up and the site you want to visit is unnavigable? There is still some hope. Some sites have dedicated addresses for mobile web pages. The pages are based on the same idea as the ones that might automatically come up with your phone if it detects a mobile browser, but they have a different web address. These are typically are either www.site.com/mobile or m.site.com. You can try to see if you get anything at either of these addresses. It's kind of a shot in the dark, but sometimes works.
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