Yes it is incredibly lame. None of Google's mobile sites work without changing the useragent to for example the itouch.

It seems more and more sites are going back to user-agent white-listing which is something that should have died years ago. It's being completely abused. Rather than "here's a page optimized for you and the same but with optimizations for someone else", it is a no-cake-for-you scenario.

Marucco "gmail viewer" - really a web browser hard-coded with iphone user-string makes it a bit more obvious to investigate this issue.

Then of course there is the whole webkit versus gecko, opera, etc HTML5 issues. -___-

Off-topic but is anyone working on improving that gstreamer-patched Firefox?