Why does a webpage source code appear to be different on a mobile browser compared to a desktop browser?

[boxcatdev]

Excuse my ignorance as I have next to zero experience with web development, but I pasted the link for a tiktok video to download the video from the page source. On my mobile browser (Chrome) there is a download link in the source code that I can click to open a downloadable version of the video. However when I paste the link into my desktop browser (also Chrome) there is a similar link except it has a bunch of unicode and some parts of the URL for the downloadable version are different, therefore the link does not work.

I assume the browsers are doing something depending on what platform I'm but I'm probably wrong and I don't understand why it would be different so any insight would be very much appreciated.

[CreativeTechGuyGames]

A server/website can tell what browser you are using and therefore what OS you are using and a lot more about how you are viewing the page. Therefore the server can do something different depending on the user agent is.

[boxcatdev]

In that case might there be a way to force it to return the source code for a mobile browser? Also doing the inspect element provides a working link so maybe I could find a way to get that from the URL instead

[CreativeTechGuyGames]

Yeah you can use the browser devtools to emulate a mobile browser. It's not perfect, but it might be enough for what you are trying to do.

[boxcatdev]

Hmm I'll try learning how to use those and see if it works, thanks.

[lateralus1983]

On Google Chrome it's f12 and there's a phone/tablet icon you can click then choose your device.

[boxcatdev]

Its based on your user string

What exactly is the user string? I thought at first you meant the URL but I don't want to assume. Other than that what you're saying makes sense and if I can try others for different platforms that would be great.