How do I make the Flatpak version of Epiphany not render as a mobile browser?

dryphb · June 9, 2026, 7:59am

Hey, first time lurker, first time poster. I’m a fan of GNOME and the epiphany browser except for the fact that it renders as if it’s on an ancient Android phone. How do I make it render sites like a modern PC browser instead? Thanks in advance!

bring_back_buttons · June 11, 2026, 4:10am

What exactly do you mean by rendering as if it’s on an ancient Android phone?

dryphb · June 11, 2026, 9:31am

This link should show exactly what I mean

GeopJr · June 11, 2026, 1:14pm

WebKitGTK sets the user agent to ‘like Android 4.4’ when it detects your device is ‘mobile’

github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Source/WebCore/platform/glib/UserAgentGLib.cpp

eb193e1e7


      
              if (chassisType() == WTF::ChassisType::Mobile)
                  return "Linux"_s;
              return "X11"_s;
          #endif
          }
          
          static const String platformVersionForUAString()
          {
          #if OS(UNIX)
              if (chassisType() == WTF::ChassisType::Mobile)
                  return "like Android 4.4"_s;
          
              struct utsname name;
              uname(&name);
              static NeverDestroyed<const String> uaOSVersion(makeString(unsafeSpan(name.sysname), ' ', unsafeSpan(name.machine)));
              return uaOSVersion;
          #else
              // We will always claim to be Safari in Intel Mac OS X, since Safari without
              // OS X or anything on ARM triggers mobile versions of some websites.
              static NeverDestroyed<const String> uaOSVersion(MAKE_STATIC_STRING_IMPL("Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4"));
              return uaOSVersion;

which I assume is what’s causing this issue. I’d say report it to webkit if that’s wrong / it shouldn’t do that, with your device info; but for now you could set the user agent to something like this and see if it fixes it flatpak run --command=gsettings org.gnome.Epiphany set org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/ user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/60.5 Safari/605.1.15'

mcatanzaro · June 11, 2026, 5:04pm

Uh, well as you see from the code it should only do that if using a mobile chassis type, which would be highly unusual for a desktop. Check with:

$ hostnamectl | grep Chassis

dryphb · June 11, 2026, 8:45pm

It’s classed as a tablet, which is a half-truth. I’m running a Legion Go, which scales nicely to 166% at 1600p (native resolution). So that’s that noted down. However, it doesn’t answer the more pressing question: Why such an ancient version of Android?