- EDIT -

Hah, my trust in Google, expressed so long ago in a thread here, was not misplaced. I think, anyway. In a more objectively accurate note, Google has stopped redirecting the MicroB browser to mobile view. It goes to standard by default like before. Thank you Google.

- The rest of this post is left for archival purposes, in case anyone cares -

Sorry if this is in the wrong section, or if someone makes a thread about this by the time I do. Mods, feel free to merge/move accordingly.

Anyway, I went to GMail today from my N900 all happy and expecting it to look like it does on my computer. No luck. Now it defaults to mobile. The best you can get is the HTML view - you cannot manually get it to go back to the true normal-computer standard view.

[rant - feel free to skip to the end of rant]
Am I the only one who's royally pissed about this? I know it's not a big deal but I one, wish I got at least some choice, but two, I honestly don't want to work around with user agent changing, mainly because I feel there's no ethical reason why I should.

I did a search, and the most I could find was a post on google's help forum by some guy from April complaining about how he wants MicroB to be recognized as a mobile phone. He never got a reply that I could find, but I wouldn't be surprised if this and similar sentiments are behind this, rather than any bad intentions on Google's behalf. I think this honestly pisses me off more now. Google, for whatever reason, may do stuff like this in their ignorance or any number of things, but I doubt they would do it with anything but well-meaning.

I cannot for the life of me imagine why you would buy a device with a browser blatantly marketed as a selling point to be a full ccomputer-like browser, and then have a problem with GMail being anything but the full experience.

I could perfectly use the in-browser chat gmail has for ****s sake! I had to disable Javascript pausing and I occasionally got a bug or two, but by god it worked, and almost perfectly well.

I read that changing user-agent to android eventually stopped letting you get to the mobile version, but you'd go and ask people to take away the full version from everyone using the browser just because you can't be bothered to find a way to meet your odd preference? I get, yes, that GMail might be a bandwith hog when accessed from a mobile over 3G or 2.5G or whatever. But I really don't get how people can be so short sighted. Did the person I'm *****ing about bother getting any other user agent? How about the iPhone as user agent? I don't think there's a site in the world that will give you a full version for that one....
[/rant]

I just wish Google, of all things, had long ago realized to give users a choice. Would it really be hard for a giant like Google to give the world a way to set page rendering preferences? They could even use a user-agent-specific way to set these things for users willing to work at it. IE: Set mobile for MicroB if it so suits you, leave everything else as default, or set iPhone and MicroB and Android to basic HTML and leave all else at default, or leave everything as default and let the people who want mobile GMail on an N900 but can't be bothered to get a second browser yet are willing to screw over every other user of a device to have their quirks without imposing it on us.

Ranting aside, I hope the first paragraph of this was productive and gave people a heads up. I also hope there moral of the story is gotten: don't blindly ask companies to make something work how you want it. At the very least consider how many others might want the same thing and how many will only be inconvenienced if it goes through; ideally ask that an option exist, unless you can make a good argument from an ethics standpoint why having a choice is morally bad.

{For archival purposes, I'm adding the date I edited this into the post in there: "Last edited by Mentalist Traceur; 07-11-10 at 10:58 AM."}

- EDIT (because I know there's people on this forum who won't read the entire thread, unfortunately) -
The three basic solutions to this right now are:
1. Add "?ui=2" to the end of gmail's url: "mail.google.com/mail/". Then either bookmark it or type it like that every time "mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2".
2. Go into about:config in your browser, find the general.useragent.vendor line (you can type it in to the box above, and that will narrow down the list). Then select it, press enter, and type in a new string. It can honestly be anything. "Don't treat N900's browser as mobile, Google" or something, will work just fine.
3. Install "Hide User Agent" or however exactly it's typed. By default it sets your user agent to just "Maemo Browser", instead of the long string it normally has, and that works. From there you can set the string to whatever, such as the above example, or look through the thread for one of the other examples for what you can change your useragent to.

I agree wholeheartedly.

It is a major PITA!

Don't these companies understand these thing should be optional?

Even if something is changed by default at least give me the option to go back.

Nearly as bad as the stupid background picture thing they did yesterday.
"Hey Microsoft we're so insecure and threatened by Bing we can do this too?"

EDIT: Actually "mobile" gmail is worse!

I can chooe for 'simple HTML' at the bottom of the page. Then again at that page, you can choose for 'standard' view. Save that at your favorites or desktop. Done.

For me, standard takes me back to mobile view..

Do you have a user-agent switcher or something installed?

@ggroen: For future reference, I don't make posts about a problem unless I'm either really incapable of looking for a solution at that moment, or have at least tried basic stuff.

Maybe it's system based and maybe it's a user-agent-thing related. Maybe some other program. Maybe they reacted ridiculously quickly to uproar from other MicroB users who just didn't post here and there's an active update passing through their servers to let you go back to true 'standard' view. Maybe a lucky glitch. For me standard took me back to mobile, as it did for snookh.

GMail still gives me full version on my N900? I've only installed AdBlock Plus for MicroB...?

It gives full gmail to me....

I have flashed my N900 3 weeks ago(only the fw, not emmc) so i'm not sure if it still makes a difference, but you can get to deeper settings of MicroB by writing some command to MicroB address bar.
Example when i write something to address bar it doesn't take me to mobile google, but full google. So i'm not sure if this is the key here? I did this some months ago.

Maybe somebody can give link to the thread or knows what i'm talking about.

Tissot, I know what you're talking about. I did that in mine a while ago.... Google search still does full google...

I found something that may be at fault, which, if correct, makes me blaming of google hot-headed and misplaced.

I logged into one of my GMail accounts from another phone beforehand. Even though I have logged out of it in that phone, it seems that T-Mobile's server is still keeping it's connection open. Every time I kick it off (which you can do from the basic HTML version of GMail) it re-logs in, presumably by the time I am able to hit the link for standard view.

I'll kick it one more time and change password, and report if that fixes it. HOWEVER, this doesn't explain why my other gmail account came up as mobile, since that was never logged in, or why others are getting the same problem.

Update: I tried to do the above and the same IP managed to get logged in again afterwords. So either GMail's communication with TMobile is less secure than it should be, or the IP in question is not from anyone who should be logged in there, and someone's actually managing to be on my account. (In which case how they managed to get my account password as I changed it from the N900 I could never know. A keylogger on N900 would probably fail. Similarly, I doubt a packet sniffer could figure it out since our WiFi is WPA-key-protected and, as far as I know, uses encryption.)

IP is 24.92.29.209, if anyone knows what that's from. It's neither my N900's nor my home computer's.

- Edit -

Same issue with the account on my gmail account that has never been accessed by mobile phone. (That is, another session is being reported, labeled as "mobile", by GMail, same IP as above.)

So at this point I have no idea what this is about... I'm at my family's home right now. I have no idea how they have their router set up (dad's a programmer, not a newb like me, maybe he has the router mask it's IP and it's keeping the connection live - but this is the first time it's happened).

Honestly, I'm not sure where to go with this from here. Is anyone else who's having their GMail go to mobile-version in MicroB having Gmail tell them they are getting random IP connected to their accounts simultaneously as their own?