I don’t know about you, but I just love browsing the mobile web on my development machine. The minimalism is so striking.  It’s so refreshing to view things from a mobile device perspective in today’s content- and graphic-laden Internet….  Since sarcasm is so hard to notice on the Internet, I’ll tell it like it is: I’m being sarcastic.

That being said, sometimes it is necessary to view a website you are developing from a mobile perspective.  I am a huge fan of websites that are mobile friendly.  There are two main ways of making a website mobile friendly:

1. 1. Considering mobile browsers in your initial design
2. 2. Building a mobile version of your site specifically for mobile browsers

I like sites that provide both.  An example of option one is making sure that any dropdown menus are functional on a mobile device.  Most mobile devices don’t have a means to hover a pointer over an element like a desktop mouse.  An example of option two is the Volvo Rents Construction Equipment website.  Visiting www.volvorents.com in a browser will result in two different websites based on whether or not you are using a mobile device.

This functionality is built on something called a user agent.  To see your current user agent visit http://whatsmyuseragent.com.  While that long string of names and numbers might not mean a lot to you, a developer can harness that user agent in order to provide two very different experiences to users of a site.

Now, let’s get a little technical.  I develop, work, and live (during my workday) in the Chromium browser, the open-source version of the Google Chrome browser.  If I want to check the features and display of a mobile version of a website, I can launch Chromium or Google Chrome from the terminal and tell it what user agent to use.

This launch flag/command line option is extremely useful.  I encourage you to try it out.  Start up a terminal and run one of the above commands respective to the browser you have installed.  Go ahead, you can use my phone’s user agent.  I don’t mind.  Once you have the browser running, visit www.volvorents.com and see what you get.  Several other sites you can visit and play around with a mobile user agent are Facebook, Amazon, NFL, ESPN.

To see a large list of different user agents, visit: http://www.user-agents.org/ You can use the user agents listed on that site to see what it’s like to browse the web as a robot.