LAHORE (Daily Point) — In the landscape of mobile device browsing in the 2020s, users often face frustration due to the intrusive design elements employed by mobile designers.
A persistent top banner that follows you as you scroll, coupled with a bottom banner laden with ads, newsletter sign-up forms, and app prompts, often obscures the desired content, making text navigation challenging.
Fortunately, a workaround exists to enhance the reading experience – opting for the desktop version of the site. Despite the evolution of mobile browsing, many websites still carry the burden of cumbersome mobile pages. Responsive design has improved adaptability, allowing desktop sites to scale seamlessly based on screen width.
The primary distinction between the mobile and desktop versions lies in the persistent interruptions during scrolling. Choosing the desktop version can often eliminate these mobile-specific nuisances, providing a more enjoyable reading experience.
Requesting the desktop site is a simple process. In Safari on iPhone and iPad, tapping the “aA” icon in the bottom-right corner and selecting “Request Desktop Website” does the trick. This can even be set to automatically request the desktop version in website settings. On Android devices with the Chrome browser, enabling “Desktop Site” in the three-dot menu in the top-right corner achieves the same result.
While requesting the desktop version addresses some annoyances, an even more effective solution is utilizing Reader Mode. This feature, available on major smartphones, extracts article text from any website, displaying only the relevant content. In Safari, tapping the “aA” button in the address bar and selecting “Show Reader” accomplishes this. Though lacking a built-in reading mode, Android users can install the official Google tool, Reading Mode, from the Play Store. This tool adds a systemwide button for extracting and displaying text alone.
In an era where the web is increasingly cluttered, having the right tools, such as requesting the desktop site or utilizing Reader Mode, empowers users to reclaim a more streamlined and focused reading experience.
