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How can Chrome (or some other browser) be configured to tell websites its resolution is the native resolution of the phone and not a reduced resolution that's adjusted for being high DPI? "Request desktop site" works for some sites, but not all, and ones that detect the resolution of the phone will show the mobile "responsive" layout. For example, if I Google "what is my screen resolution" and visit the first site, it reports 360x640 even though my phone is 1440x2560. I'm running Lollipop if that matters.

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  • Which site you are not able to view in desktop mode? And note that changing the Browser to act like in desktop browser wont change your Screen Resolution..
    – Lucky
    Jun 3, 2015 at 15:27
  • This wasn't the site I was trying to visit, but one example is www.apple.com - haha. Yeah, request desktop site doesn't affect resolution, just user agent I believe, so that's why it's ineffective on sites that use media queries which rely on resolution to implement responsive / adaptive design instead of using user agent detection.
    – g491
    Jun 3, 2015 at 15:35

2 Answers 2

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It turns out you can use Firefox for Android to do this:

  1. In the address bar go to about:config and then search for pixels.
  2. Select layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and change the value from -1.0 (default) to 1 if you want sites to think the resolution of your browser is the true native resolution of the screen rather than a DPI-adjusted value.
  3. If you have a super high resolution screen like a QHD (1440x2560), you may want to set this to 2 rather than 1, and then if you use the phone in landscape mode, your resolution will be 1280x720 which won't make things as small by default as setting it to 1 would.

Using the above in conjunction with "Request desktop site" should do a great job at always showing the desktop site for not only user-agent-detection-based sites but also for responsive media-query-based sites.

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  • For a 720p phone I had to put 0.5 to get the desktop version of a particular website.
    – Chris
    Oct 20, 2018 at 14:31
  • Wow, I've been struggling and disappointed for months, trying (and failing) to find a solution to let my high physical resolution tablet displays the web pages with more "screen asset". Some other solutions say I would either need to root my device or use a PC and adb, blah blah blah. Now I'm pleasantly surprised that the solution is as simple as installing a normal app! Thank you @g491 ! Can we do the same change on Chrome too?
    – RayLuo
    Feb 8, 2019 at 8:53
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    @RayLuo I'm not aware of a way to do that in Chrome but I don't know how. I just tried searching chrome://flags for some things like dpi, resolution, scale, zoom, etc. and didn't see anything. There could be another way but I'm not sure.
    – g491
    Feb 9, 2019 at 15:50
  • Even in Firefox, such setting would only work for some sites (such as this StackExchange.com) but not others (such as visualstudio.com). Why is that? And is there any better method? (Nope, I don't consider the 18 inch Samsung Galaxy View a method in this context.)
    – RayLuo
    Nov 12, 2019 at 23:27
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Try using Opera for Mobile and setup the Desktop mode in Settings and Turn off the Opera Turbo mode. Now you'll be able to view sites like Facebook, Stackoverflow etc like the same way it is loaded in Desktop web browsers. Some websites redirect to theire mobile website even if you set to Desktop mode.

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  • By "setup the Desktop mode", is this referring to Settings -> User agent -> change from "Mobile" to "Desktop"? If so, this still has the same issue.
    – g491
    Jun 3, 2015 at 15:39
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    Well you can spoof your browser to act like a desktop version but you can't change the resolution of the device from the browser..those website are designed as responsive desgin so they will display according to the resolution and fits to the view port of the device...Also have a look at How to disable zoom in a mobile webpage?..these settings will have no effect on the Desktop view setting that we make in our browsers
    – Lucky
    Jun 3, 2015 at 18:13
  • I realized I didn't check the about:config in Firefox and sure enough there was a setting there. I posted it as an answer to this question for others who may come across this.
    – g491
    Jun 6, 2015 at 0:05

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