Google iPhone reader refomats my web pages

Google reader is a fantastic RSS reader and I use both the full web version and the iPhone mobile version daily. It’s simple to use, fast, and it’s a web app, and I’m a big supporter of web based applications. The only real thing it needs now is some fancy HTML 5 database storage, then we could use it offline and there would be no need for standalone apps while on the subway.

About a month ago the iPhone version started reformatting all of my linked web pages to a mobile Google format. This was frustrating since the iPhone is fully capable of displaying rich web content and in some cases I wanted to see iPhone specific HTML and Javascript content in action. Unfortunately all of this is stripped out in the mobile version. I put up with this for a few days before I decided to look for the settings.

Easy fix

To get your linked web pages back to the way they were meant to be, scroll to the bottom of your iPhone reader and click settings. At the time of writing this you will find 3 settings. Uncheck “Reformat linked web pages for mobile browsers.” and you will now be linking to the real web pages. I’m not sure if I inadvertently turned this on, but if this is the default setting it seems kind of odd for the iPhone version. Luckily with Google there is always lots of ways to customize your experience and they have a great number of other mobile solutions online.