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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> give your page it's own top navigation

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?

Yes, let's apply blanket rules to every experience. Sigh.

There are plenty of uses for fixed navigation that aren't spammy attempts to force app downloads. Users like them. Not all users, but most.

yes, in our experience building games this has been a major issue / concern for iphone players.

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.

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