How to Switch from Mobile Sites to Desktop Sites in Chrome?

Product Forums Tips & Tricks
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Hello everyone, I’m Darshan Hiranandani, need help with switching from mobile sites to desktop versions in Chrome. I’ve already tried a few methods like adjusting the viewport, using JavaScript to change the user agent, and appending “?view=desktop” to the URL, but nothing seems to work. I’d like to find a solution without clicking specific elements or using tricks like that. Is there any way to adjust settings directly through ‘chrome://settings’ or another method you suggest? Please share your thoughts and suggestions! Thank you!

Regards
Darshan Hiranandani

1 Like
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What do you mean by the words: “mobile site” and “desktop version”? Please elaborate them, as I have no idea what.

3

Hi @darshanhiranandani23,

Welcome to our community. Thank you for sharing your issue.

Doing some research, I recommend that:
You can automate the process of switching between mobile and desktop views using KS as follows:

  1. Change the User-Agent Using Katalon
    You can set a custom user-agent to mimic a desktop browser when making requests or opening web pages. Example:
import com.kms.katalon.core.webui.keyword.WebUiBuiltInKeywords as WebUI
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions

// Set up ChromeOptions with a desktop user-agent
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions()
options.addArguments("--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36")

// Start WebDriver with the options
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options)

// Open the desired URL in desktop view
driver.get('https://example.com')

// Use Katalon WebDriver to interact
WebUI.openBrowser('')
WebUI.switchToWindowIndex(0)

This will force the browser to load the desktop version by changing the user-agent.

  1. Set Viewport to Desktop Dimensions
    If the website is relying on screen dimensions instead of user-agent detection, adjust the browser window size to mimic a desktop environment using setViewPortSize()
    This approach ensures the browser renders the desktop version based on screen dimensions.

  2. Append Query Parameters in Tests
    Some websites use query parameters like ?view=desktop to switch views, using WebUI.navigateToUrl(url + '?view=desktop')

  3. Verify Desktop View
    You can verify whether the view is correct by checking specific elements unique to the desktop layout:

boolean isDesktopView = WebUI.verifyElementPresent(findTestObject('Page_DesktopSpecificElement'), 5)
if (isDesktopView) {
    println 'Desktop view successfully loaded!'
} else {
    println 'Failed to load desktop view.'
}

Hope this can help you. Let us know your trial

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did it work @darshanhiranandani23