I know the iPad in Portrait and probably the iPad Mini in both orientations resolve to what is considered a "small" screen by Material Design guidelines. It could be that Google's search result display are based on the size of the screen you have and the iPad Mini just may fall under what they categorize as a mobile device.

iPad is the iOS sideshow in sale numbers by far -- no reason to prioritize it. And, more cynical, using the parent comment's reasoning: iPad _is_ a competitor to Google's Chrome OS in education, so maybe they don't want it to work too well.

Can you imagine being the programmer on that project?

It is probably based on browser user-agent detection that doesn't distinguish between iPhone/iPod Touch iOS Safari and iPad iOS Safari. It is not necessarily an active act of malice nor even anything more than "cleaning up" some of the user agent code.

This seems extraordinarily unlikely, google pays a lot of attention to user agents.

I don't think they'll tell engineers to make the experience bad. I used to work for Google, and it doesn't strike me as the place where that would work. More likely is that there just isn't anyone responsible for this; whether that's due to iPad being too small to be worth the opportunity cost of putting someone one it, or due to the more cynical interpretation.

Yeah, it would totally suck to have strangers attacking your ethics instead of considering the small tap targets on iPad minis.

> no reason to prioritize it

no reason to explicit fuck it up, except... oh yeah, competitor to your own tablets.

Have you tried to Request Desktop Site? It work fine for me on my iPad and iPhone, so I don’t see a reason why it won’t work on iPad Mini. Granted, it is annoying that you can’t set Safari to always load the desktop version by default and you have to force the desktop mode every time you open a new tab, but it is better than nothing.

I haven’t used an Android tablet in a long time, but I think those load the mobile version as well.

And lastly, I’ve never had a problem with the mobile version — I actually prefer it on touch based devices.

you have to 'request desktop site' for each search.

Yeah, that’s a pain.

I use an iPad mini frequently (on one now) and I prefer the mobile format on it.