Spending $1,999 on a folding bar and then clicking on a packed website is not something everyone wants.
Apple’s Safari team said on Friday there is a way to explain websites to use more of the iPhone Duo’s external display. Currently, a column of Safari controls is swallowing a chunk of the screen.
Why does Safari feel so cramped on the outside screen?
The answer is simple: Safari controls sit on the right side, and websites cannot drag behind them. Apple moved them there to save vertical space, but it comes at the cost of width.
That leaves pages about 382 CSS pixels wide in portrait, for anyone well-versed in the units web designers use. Safari tints the remaining strip to match the web page, but that looks like wasted space to me.
You may wonder why Apple doesn’t leave the pages below. Developers can technically do it with a setting called viewport-fit=cover, which makes a page fill the entire screen.
The problem, however, is what Jen Simmons of WebKit points out: many sites do not leave safe margins on all edges. As a result, a button or caption may disappear under the controls.
What is Apple asking, and what can you do today?
Instead of flipping that switch, Apple wants something more robust and easier for developers. For now, it asks for ideas and promises to keep us updated. I appreciate the honesty, but there is no official date or timeline yet.
Until then, I would have read long pages on the inner screen, where scrolling feels better.
The silver lining, however, is how the browser handles PDFs. Open a PDF in Safari and fold the phone partially (like a paperback), and you’ll see two pages at once. The interface switches back to one when the phone is lying flat or closed.
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