A number of Pixel users in Australia are reporting that some popular sites, which have had mobile-optimised sites in the past, are refusing to load properly on their new phones. We’ve noticed this ourselves, especially when browsing certain Fairfax and News Limited properties. It’s rather frustrating, because the desktop versions of these sites are rather heavy and render awfully on mobile. Even deliberately specifying mobile URLs (e.g. m.smh.com.au) doesn’t get the mobile version to load.
On Whirlpool, users have reported the issue and having raised it with Google Support as well. It seems, for now, that the issue lies on the part of Fairfax, News Limited and other websites, but it isn’t peculiar to Pixel phones; other users have noticed that last year’s Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P are having the same issue when running Android 7.1 preview versions.
Quite likely the issue is in how these websites detect whether a requesting browser is a mobile or not, and Android 7.1 is causing some confusion. Hopefully they’ll have it fixed soon, otherwise you’ll just have to resort to reading Ausdroid, which works beautifully on all mobile devices.
