Android Tips and tricks: Browsers in Android phones and Tablet PCs

Browser

The browser may be the app you use the most, so here’s a handful of tips to help you use it better.

Change the User Agent

Some websites will automatically serve you a mobile-friendly version of their
site, if they detect you’re using a phone. But these versions can sometimes be severely cut down versions of the main site, with far fewer features.

You can tell websites to serve you desktop versions by changing the browser’s User Agent setting to Linux Desktop or Mac Desktop. Alternatively, you can select iPhone, iPad, different versions of Android, or even IE6.

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Alter the Default Zoom

By default, when you open a page, your zoom level will be set to Medium. You can change this to Far or Close by altering the “Default zoom” option in the settings.

The other setting that affects this is “Open pages in overview”, which makes new pages open zoomed all the way out when checked.

Quickly Access the Address Bar

Instead of scrolling all the way back up to the top of the page, you can just hit Menu to make the address bar appear.

On devices designed for Ice Cream Sandwich, which have no Menu button, you can do a “pull-down” gesture to achieve the same thing.