Apple - Can you force a mobile site on your iPhone to show full desktop view?

I don't think you can do this in Safari on the iPhone but you could use a 3rd party browser app. Many of those will let you set the browser agent. One browser I know does this is 'Atomic Web Browser'. This may not work in all cases as some websites may use other ways of determining which content to show, for example, some will detect the screen dimensions.

I've tried this on my iPhone with Atomic Web Browser. Within the browser, I went to settings, 'Identify browser as' and selected 'Safari Desktop'. Then I went to nascar.com and tapped on the nascar logo. It showed me the desktop version of the page.

I checked in mobile safari and doing the same indeed took me to a mobile version.


An additional recommendation: the free Puffin browser in the App Store displays full websites.


Google Chrome for iPhone is my daily driver for Stackexchange and it works wonderfully well both in desktop and mobile modes.

request desktop site

  1. Tap the menu button
  2. Reqest Desktop Site