Ancestry.com stuck on mobile version using desktop Safari

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WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Ancestry.com stuck on mobile version using desktop Safari

I've been using Ancestry.com on Safari on my MacBookPro for years. I'm currently using 10.15.16 MacOS.

Suddenly Safari will only show the mobile version of Ancestry's website. Despite clearing the cache and cookies for all Ancestry.com websites and rebooting, now every link to Ancestry only shows the mobile version. Every non-Ancestry.com website operates normally, showing non-mobile version.

On Chrome it shows the normal desktop version. Ancestry.com's support pages and staff are useless for this issue. I would rather not clean the cache and cookies for all of Safari as I'd lose useful shortcuts for hundreds of other websites. I wonder if Ancestry thinks I am using an iPhone due to a cookie from another website without the ancestry name, if I could only find that, I could delete that cookie.

Any suggestions appreciated! Thanks.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Sep 20, 2020 4:30 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Oct 7, 2020 7:04 AM in response to WSE1951

To anyone reading this: I solved the issue. The problem was not due to cookies or cache. In Safari Preferences, there is a tab for Websites/Page Zoom. Somehow, Ancestry.com was set to the wrong number. When I deleted the setting entirely, the problem disappeared.

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Answer 2

WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Sep 20, 2020 5:23 PM in response to WSE1951

I would add that I have tried dozens of other websites and all are normal. Only Ancestry shows the mobile version, and only on Safari. Cleaning the ancestry cache and cookies, quitting Safari and relaunching doesn't help

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Answer 3

WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Sep 20, 2020 6:13 PM in response to ckuan

Thanks for your idea. I checked User Agent. It was set to Default (Automatically chosen). I set it to Safari 14.0 but it made no difference.

My wife has a MacBookPro running same version of MacOS and on her machine, Ancestry renders properly.

I realize this is an Ancestry-caused problem, but since their tech support was useless, I thought maybe someone in the Apple community might know of a non-Ancestry entitled cookie that I could delete to solve my problem.

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Answer 4

WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Sep 21, 2020 5:37 AM in response to ckuan

I created a new user, opened Safari went to Ancestry.com and it rendered normally. I wrote down the names of every cookie and cache — there were about 40! — then returned to my user and manually deleted all of them. Quit and restarted Safari and Ancestry still went to the mobile version!

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Answer 5

WSE1951 Author

Level 1

47 points

Oct 6, 2020 5:13 PM in response to ckuan

Thanks for trying. Ancestry's website offers no effective way to communicate with them. I am fresh out of ideas as to how that one website, but no other website, can think I am on an iOS device instead of a laptop; even after I delete every cookie associated with Ancestry.

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