[!!11oneone]

Most sites will redirect you to the mobile version when you access on a phone, whether you want it or not.

But lots of people share links from mobile, via twitter or email. So why don't sites also redirect desktop browsers to the full version of the site instead of serving them a stretched out, hard to read mobile version?

Is there a Chrome plugin to do it?

[flagpole]

it depends on the site.

some sites will set the layout as the url is requested and simply serve a different page. other sites will change the URL to like m.digitalspy.co.uk and you can't really recover it. you can guess the url obviously but there is no hard and fast way of doing it.

[!!11oneone]

That's what I mean. If you go to digitalspy.co.uk on a mobile, the site will read the user agent and divert you to m.digitalspy.co.uk

I don't really see why the inverse can't happen, see that m.digitalspy.co.uk is requested, check the user agent and if it's not a mobile then divert to the desktop site. Also, the Android browser has a 'request desktop site' option, which means a desktop browser could surely utilise this? Not sure how that works, if it's ignoring user agent then I guess not. But it seems always to work, even when I've not been redirected first.

[flagpole]

the request desktop site function changes the user agent

eg on my nexus 7
from
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.2; Nexus 7 Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19

to
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.45 Safari/535.19

the problem is the site's are not necessarily running the user agent test when you are viewing m.webite.co.uk some do, but most don't. some will redirect you if you use the request desktop site function and thee should also redirect you in your normal desktop browser.

[!!11oneone]

OK, I get why it doesn't happen. But it seems it would be pretty simple to implement. It's really annoying!