IPhone – make mobile Safari open YouTube links in the browser

In short: no, you can't stop it. It's Google re-directing you.

You can work around it though. You can scroll down to the very bottom of the page and tap the "desktop" link, which will take you to the full desktop version of the site. If what you want is the YouTube app to open, then all you can do is copy the name of the video from safari into the YouTube app.

I know what you mean about it not loading the videos. It's annoying!

To Request the Desktop version of a website with faulty redirects:

1. Turn on airplane mode to disable all internet access.

   Warning: This next step will get rid of any open tabs you have in Safari, so make sure you don't have anything important on there.

2. Go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data

   (Many redirects are often cached, so this is a way to prevent it from redirecting you while you are offline.)

3. Launch Safari and type in the full desktop url (e.g. http://example.com/some_page)

4. Press Go to navigate to the website.

   Obviously this will display the "Safari cannot open the page..." error message.

5. Tap the address bar again, and scroll down to tap Request Desktop Site.

6. Disable airplane mode, and tap the refresh button.

   It should now bypass all redirects and request the full Desktop Site.

Unfortunately this isn't a complete solution since only a small portion of users on mobile devices are going to be using the desktop site for webpages such as these. This means that some things on that site may be broken since they aren't likely to have been tested on mobile devices.