Mobile Website Testing on Your Desktop

Testing a new website on mobile can be awkward on a mobile phone. Testing a mobile site on your desktop though is much easier and although it may be offer all the technical challenges that you get on a real mobile, it will at least show you what the user experience is like in terms of how the site renders on a mobile screen. below are two techniques to use your desktop browsers to feel like a mobile.

How to test mobile websites on Google Chrome.

Open a instance of Chrome
Hold down CTRL, SHIFT and ‘i’ together
Click on the Setting Gears in the bottom right hand corner
Click on ‘Override User Agent’
From the drop down choose your mobile user agent, e.g. iPhone iOS 5
Refresh the browser and you now see a mobile screen

As you can see you can now view the mobile experience on your desktop and this allows you to test your customers smart phone experience from your desktop.

You can choose different user agents to test against, e.g. different browsers and different devices, e.g. iPhone, iPad, Blackberry…etc.

If your browser preference is Firefox, you can also test the smart phone experience on that browser. Slightly more to it this time, you have to download a User Switcher Agent from Mozilla - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/. When you do this and reboot your browser, simply follow these steps: