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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

There were some good comments on Designer News about this: https://news.layervault.com/stories/17576-viewport-meta-tag-...

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."

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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.

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.

Right, like in a web app on the home screen.

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:

http://i.imgur.com/Y1rojH9.png

Yes. PLEASE don't use this for regular documents. It's only for games and "web apps".

Good luck with that. Just look at home many crappy mobile "optimized" sites are out there.

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.

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.

You can disable CSS or use a user stylesheet to your liking.

That's the amazing thing about HTML + CSS + JS, not available to PDF or any other format/medium in common use.

In Mobile Safari?

How?

> "If designers really want to control presentation, they should look into another format, like PDF."

As a designer, I can't help but read that and crack up. You have got to be joking, right?

He's Rex Rolling you...

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.

That was putting control in the hands of the marketers, not necessarily designers.

Certainly true of the ad's. But, IMHO, it's designers who seem to love the infinite scrolling and other gimmickry.

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.

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