Below is a screenshot of the BBC homepage running on Fennec 7 (UA string: Mozilla/5.0 (Maemo; Linux armv7l; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20120205 Firefox/7.0.1 Fennec/7.0.1).If you poke about a bit with Fennec, it can be made to play flash content (apparently flashplugin can cause crashes though). Version 7 also supports WebM; though the playback is in fact quite patchy because it seems to force 360p, which is too much for stock kernel.

I tried these strings in the settings UI for Hide User Agent, which affects microB only:
1. Desktop equivalent to microB: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Debian/5.04 (lenny) Firefox/3.6.3)
2. Fennec (as above): Mozilla/5.0 (Maemo; Linux armv7l; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20120205 Firefox/7.0.1 Fennec/7.0.1)

Neither made a difference so it must be the layout engine using out of date terms. I'm going to try to "drop-in" Fennec's Gecko/XUL-runner into the microB directory. Hopefully the phone won't die, because of all the underlying OS stuff that depends on the browser, so I'll be able to report back some useful results...

Aside:
Fennec 7 is quite good. Unfortunately, its UI is not designed for devices (a) that have hardware keyboards, (b) whose screens are high dpi resistive or (c) that don't have a lot of RAM - i.e. the N900! Forms and media-playback aren't reliable but general browsing is good. Sometimes if you need to view things and neither microB nor Opera can handle it, Fennec is worth a try.

Since when did Microsoft sell the BBC to Apple?

I have just checked www.bbc.co.uk on linux desktop firefox (3.6.x) and microb, and for all intents and purposes the layout is near identical. And I don't get redirected to the mobile site when using microb.

The only difference between desktop firefox and microb is that with the latter I get some text "IN ASSOCIATION WITH" at various places in the page where presumably some advert should be shown but is not. As I have adblocker on firefox I don't even see that text.

the bbc site is now showing properly using microb, i've not changed or updated anything so im guessing they've made a change?

Happy days.

I still get redirected to http:/m.bbc.co.uk every time I try to access
www.bbc.co.uk.
I am using the "stock" browser on my N900's. Same issue
with both of them. Is there any way around this?