Monday, March 19, 2012

Really, ESPN?

I present to you ESPN's "tablet" site:





In the immortal words of Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers - really?? ESPN, did you design this in 1996 in the hopes that tablets would one day be invented? Or maybe it was made for a prototype web browser on the Newton. Either way, ESPN, do you really think that a modern machine like the iPad, or even various Android tablets, is capable of loading nothing more complicated than a list of text links? Really?

Now, to be fair, a more normal-looking tablet site loads in Safari (the above is in Atomic). But Atomic loads the full desktop site no problem, so I have no idea what ESPN is doing here.

2 comments:

  1. Obviously, the site thinks Atomic is a phone. Each browser reports to an website what type of device it is, and Atomic must be reporting itself in a way that confuses the ESPN site. You might want to take this up with the developers of Atomic. They can probably get this fixed.

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    1. This is probably what's going on. But Atomic has user agent switching, with separate settings for iPad and iPhone, and it gives the same result either way when no other site has been confused by this in nearly a year of constant use. And if it thinks it's a phone, why is this clearly labelled "tablet site?" Not mobile, not smartphone, specifically tablet. I'm sure Atomic is part of the problem, but something is clearly odd on ESPN's end, too.

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