Support fullscreen on iOS Safari

• Component: Platform
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Gregg Tavares]

I don't know where else to ask this or who to petition so I'm sorry if this is the wrong place.

I write lots of "fullscreen" HTML5 apps, mostly games.

These all worked on iOS7.1 Safari. I could set viewport to minimal-ui and I'd get a fullscreen browser. The browser would stay fullscreen unless the use touched some very small (0.5cm) area at the top of the browser. In that case the address bar would appear but it wasn't too bad because touching the page content would make the bar go away. Most games don't ask the user to touch the top of the screen so this was fine.


in iOS8 though all that changed. The area the use can touch to make the address bar appear as increased by at least 4x.  #1 the top area that will make the address bar appear is about 1cm. #2 the bottom 1cm also makes the bars appear.  Most game DO ask the user to touch the bottom of the screen. This means fullscreen HTML games no longer run on iOS Safari. That's bad enough but on top of that two more things happen that didn't happen on iOS 7.1

A) There's no way to get rid of the bars. Once the appear THEY NEVER DISAPPEAR EVER. Unlike iOS7 where tapping the content would make them disappear iOS8 they never disappear

B) The move the content and don't give the page enough info to adjust.  In iOS7.1 the content didn't move. In iOS8 the content is shifted down by the size of the address bar, the navigation bar at the bottom is covering content. The page has no way to adjust for this. No metrics (body.clientHeight, window.innerHeight, etc) change so that the page could respond to 20% of it being covered up.

So, I filed this issue


Can you please provide a solution. Here's a few suggestions

1) Make iOS Safari work like it did in iOS7.1

In other words
* make it so the bottom of the screen does not bring up the bars 
* make it so if the bars appear touching the page content makes them disappear

2) Support the HTML5 Fullscreen API

http://www.w3.org/TR/fullscreen/

Chrome on Android already does this and therefore provides a solution for fullscreen HTML5 apps

3) something else?



reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26288076/how-to-get-safari-on-ios8-to-hide-the-toolbars-on-an-iphone-4-4s-5-5s

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Please report this to Apple via http://bugreport.apple.com. The WebKit project only does WebKit, not Safari, and also it's Apple who decides which WebKit features to enable or disable in iOS and OS X.