This fixes one of my biggest annoyances with iOS7 Safari - that it 'steals' 50px or so of tappable space at the bottom of the screen. If you try to use it, it shows the bottom bar instead of allowing you to interact with the page.
That said, this is kind of not-good-at-all. An individual page shouldn't be able to control UI like this, IMO. A lot of the changes Apple made to Safari in iOS7 were bad ones, and they seem to have invented a new meta tag to get around admitting that they mis-stepped.
Agree in principle but I think with the web being so varied it's hard to have a one size fits all.
Certainly it shouldn't be abused for general websites, but for sites that represent something that's more 'app like' say a game, it's a fair way of indicating to the browser we'd like the UI removed more than not.
Chrome on Android does that. I hate it. Whenever I scroll a line or two too far and want to scroll back, I have to go twice as far because the chrome decides to come back. I would welcome an alternative though.
It is actually a bit worse than that. The Chrome display changes on scroll also fire a window resize event, causing pages that use this information to reflow when you just scrolled. I suppose they were thinking people don't ever size anything based on window height?
Here are a few comments below that I strongly agree with why this is a BAD change by Apple. This change kills the browser UX.
> "This reminds me of the era of chromeless popup windows. I do not like this move by Apple. A site should not be capable of deciding to make changes to a users browser UI. Especially changes that aren't explained. I'm actually disappointed this exists."
> "Think about usability: the user will not have the back, the share and the tabs buttons available by default. If you are creating an inmersive game or a webapp with the main navigation controls then minimal-ui is a good idea; for content- and document-based websites, it might not be nice for the user."
It only concerns me that the browser chrome is removed entirely. At very least the status bar should remain to give the user an obvious "system" element to touch to return to the full chrome.
The screenshots in this article are deceptive. What the meta tag does is make Safari always look how it normally looks when you scroll down from the top of a web page. So, in portrait mode, there will be a small top bar showing the website URL. In landscape mode, there will be no top bar at all. Here's a screenshot from the other commenter's website on my iPhone:
have you tried it? don't be concerned it is very easy for a user to get the ui back by scrolling up. If you haven't hit any sites yet try ours here http://www.freeriderhd.com
before this change, playing our game was a real pain on iPhone this was a much needed improvement.
I agree that there are potential issues with this. But I also believe that it is a useful control to put into the hands of designers. There are use-cases where hiding the chrome makes absolute sense - but the designer should always ensure that there's at least one control that will provide for navigation in those cases where she has opted for a minimal UI.
Putting "control in the hands of designers" gave us flashing ads, pop-up ads, pop-under ads, pop-up ads again but floating, etc. Also Flash intros, disabling the back button, "infinite scroll", and enough other anti-patterns that I would run out of fingers and toes counting them all. I have recently returned to using NoScript on my desktop browser, because ABP and Ghostery together still did not provide enough defense versus web designers.
There is no way this "feature" is not going to somehow be abused to annoy users.
I disagree. The desire to placate designers has already caused HTML to become increasing complex and now our web browsers are even downloading fonts from the Internet. If designers really want to control presentation, they should look into another format, like PDF.
Were they thinking that, by making it harder to use the chrome to leave the site, the user is encouraged to and more likely to stay on the site...?
But this is Apple after all, one of the biggest adherents to the "fashionable minimalism" trend, so it's not that surprising.
Making good UIs on a small screen is difficult, but I don't think the "hide everything and make it non-obvious and hard to discover" school of thought is the right way to go. I'll gladly sacrifice a small amount of screen space to put some useful controls there (or a reminder that there are more controls), instead of trying to maximise the area the content takes --- which is very similar to a television where you can't change the channel easily, and are just being force-fed content to consume.
It would be trivial to imitate Mobile Safari's chrome with "actuallegitdomain.com" in the address bar instead of "actuallegitdomain.com.ooo.ag" or resorting to IDN tricks (since most browsers, and I think Mobile Safari too, show the xn--wh4t3v3r.com version).
I would think a full-screen emulation of a bank app or something. Phishing email sends you to a link that "opens" your bank app and asks you to sign in.
Am I the only person who thinks that nearly every feature added in iOS 7 and iOS 7.1 is pretty terrible?
This is just another example. It's great in theory, but this should not be something that is left up to the content creators to decide.
It provides an inconsistent user experience for the person USING the browser. Imagine if you were using Chrome or Safari on desktop and you had to guess if the url bar and back button would be there every time you clicked a link to go to a new page. I suppose it is fine if you want people to feel like they are trapped on your page.
I could not agree more. Let the user decide if they want fullscreen. We already have to put up with disabled zoom, mobile "optimized" site with missing content, and annoying animations.
Damn, there's a bug. In the minimal-ui mode, if you press the url bar, then 'share' -> 'add to home screen', and then 'cancel', the page is frozen and you can't tap it to return the control to the web page. You need to press back once or do something else to get rid of the thing.
It's definitely useful, but also a bit of a shame they went non-standard. The Fullscreen API can do this in a cross browser way and with more features.
It's about time, since Safari on iOS 7 broke the hacks that hid the browser chrome we've been offering a substandard experience on iOS in our mobile image spinner. This allows us to get back to the experience available on android, desktop and older versions of iOS.
Which substandard experience are you talking about? Users never been able to hide the browser UI before, unless the user added the website as a shortcut on the springboard.
You (as a developer) could scroll by 1px to remove the address bar in iOS6. It was useful to give your page it's own top navigation or just have more content visible. That was not possible in iOS7.
So you want to fill the user's limited screen real estate with your own useless crap (usually "download our app and subscribe to our emails!"), and you're worried that the actual functional bits of the browser are getting in the way of your doing that?
because for interacting with web apps those default browser buttons are just as 'dangerous' as ads for the user accidentally tapping them and navigating away from the page
We have a 360 degree virtual tour that allows people to view a car online before buying it. On mobile there is a limited amount of screen space and there was a lot of wasted space for browse chrome that would to our users seemingly randomly hide and popup. There were ways to work around this on earlier versions by scrolling the page with js.
Hi, I thought I should tell you that I actually stopped using your site after this feature was added, because previously I could tap the bottom of the screen to get the bottom bar up, but now I can't. You might lose other users because of this, I guess.
The first time I remember seeing it was on Chrome. Who was the first to use it? I personally don't think it has much value, in and of itself, as a graphic.
What would you replace it with? I struggle with how to offer nav menus on narrow screens... I'm not in love with the hamburger icon, but it seems to have become somewhat of a standard (which I think is more important for UI elements than pure aesthetics). I'm always on the lookout for alternate solutions to try!
"As you can see, some content just cries out for a full-screen display. Now, with minimal-ui, we can do just that."
True but this cannot be done programmatically, only with the meta value when the document loads, so you better have that sort of content in its own document.
"this cannot be done programmatically" - are you sure about that? I think any half-decent programmer would be able to do this programmatically. A simple logic condition (if-then-else) should cover it.
I've been with SDF for years. I cut my Unix teeth on their servers. They're a fantastic host and I am very impressed that their "Meta Array" coped with the influx of HN traffic without skipping a beat. I've been periodically checking the site, with an empty cache, while this link was on the HN front page and page delivery was consistently sub-1s. Theirs is extremely cheap hosting too. I have nothing but praise for the SDF.
That said, this is kind of not-good-at-all. An individual page shouldn't be able to control UI like this, IMO. A lot of the changes Apple made to Safari in iOS7 were bad ones, and they seem to have invented a new meta tag to get around admitting that they mis-stepped.