- 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.