If you’re recreating issues on the desktop, then you can’t be certain that any of your fixes will work. To put it bluntly, these hacks don’t work. Where Are The World’s Best Open Device Labs?.Prioritizing Devices: Testing And Responsive Web Design.For instance, a developer might shrink the size of the desktop browser’s window to test a responsive website or alter the user agent to spoof a particular mobile device. In general, these hacks were an attempt to recreate a given issue in a desktop browser and then debug with Chrome Developer Tools or a similar desktop toolkit. With a distinct lack of debugging tools, developers turned to a variety of hacks.
Sure, you could get ahold of a device and perform a quick visual assessment, but what would you do after discovering a bug? In the early days of mobile, debugging was quite a challenge.