Impossible to hide navigation bars in Safari iOS 7 for iPhone/iPod touch

Question

I don't believe there is any solution to hide bars programmatically using javascript/css/html, but let me try to describe a problem. We are the team of mobile game developers and we have been developing a game for one year.

After iOS 7 announcement we have faced the problem that it is IMPOSSIBLE to hide the navigation bars. Once user taps in the upper or lower part of the Safari browser, navigation bars are appearing again and hide all controls of the game.

The only solution we have found so far is forcing user to:

1. Rotate device
2. Scroll the page
3. Add application to Home-screen

None of these alternatives is acceptable. It looks like Apple is aware of this problem, but keeps ignoring it. They have closed a reported bug as a duplicate of the bug #14076889.

I believe that we are not the only team who experience the same problem. Does anyone know the solution?

Answer 1

Update September 2014: iOS 8 has removed the minimal-ui feature There's again no way to remove/hide navigation bars other than to rely on the default browser behavior (bars will be hidden when scrolling, but only if the scrolling element is the BODY of the page). The only "workaround" is to save the app to the homescreen and have the proper meta tags set (see below).

Update August 2014: iOS 8 (beta) no longer supports minimal-ui. There's no workaround. (The reason for this is likely due to abuse by websites that used it to try to prevent people from navigating away, tho there may be new features in iOS 8 Safari that have not been made public yet that replace minimal-ui.)

iOS 7.1 added a new API to solve this problem:

<meta name="viewport" content="minimal-ui">

This new viewport flag hides the Safari UI by default (only a small title bar with URL and SSL indicator are shown). To access the Safari UI, users must actively tap this title bar.

Note that on iOS 7.0.x, there's no API or known workaround for this. In those versions, if you want to hide Safari's browser chrome permanently you need to either get the user to add the web app to the home screen (with the appropriate meta tags set <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">) or use some sort of native app wrapper like Phonegap and distribute via the App Store.

Personally, I wish they hadn't removed the "full screen" button they introduced in landscape mode on iOS 6 Mobile Safari, which was a great solution that made developers and users happy.

A perfect candidate for this to be solved more permanently would be for Mobile Safari to support the HTML5 full screen API (which is supported on Safari on OS X!). Alas, there's no support right now and historically iOS point releases didn't add new Safari features, so maybe that's something for iOS 8.

Answer 2

UPDATE: There is a meta property for fixing this currently in iOS7.1 Beta according to this forum post on the release notes.

<meta name="viewport" content="minimal-ui">

I have run a test and can confirm this feature is currently in Beta 2.

Answer 3

NOTE: The new minimal-ui option is a great solution but it needs to be part of the HTML response. I tried on iOS7.1 beta3 to append the viewport meta tag with JS

$('head').append('<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=0, minimal-ui">');

the value "minimal-ui" is ignored by the browser.

Answer 4

Update: iOS7.1 has now been released so the NDA has lifted.

<meta name="viewport" content="minimal-ui">

Is indeed the correct tag and works in the live release. Remember that "viewport" can support a comma separated list if you require.

I combine it with other mobile variables to make the website feel like an app:

<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, minimal-ui">

-

We have been struggling with this one too. We have a TabBar on our site and every time you attempt to click a tab safari controls pop up.

Today hope. If you are a member of the apple developer program, I would strongly suggest visiting this forum: https://devforums.apple.com/message/927476

W

Answer 5

EDIT 2:

Does not work since iOS 7.1

EDIT:

Some games have adopted an overlay that hints the player to scroll away the bars and then locks scrolling until bars pop out again. In this case position: fixed helps a lot, as it stabilizes the movement (can't explain it better, just have to try it for yourself). This game is a good example of such approach:

www.paf.com/mobile/launch/flowers.html (sorry, can't post more than 2 links)

Recently I have also stumbled upon a hack that deactivates navigation bar triggering for the top area. All you have to do is add a random element to your DOM with following styles:

z-index: 100000; /* should be bigger than everything else */
position: fixed;
overflow: scroll;
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

Read more about it here.

Answer 6

If you are creating a web-app, you can create a link to the URL from the home screen; and use the following HTML Meta Tags:

<!-- Allows fullscreen mode from the Homescreen -->
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

<!-- Sets the color of the text/battery, wireless icons etc -->
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black">

This will super-impose the indicators over your header/nav bar. (The indicators you see on all the iPad screens.

For more info, see: https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariHTMLRef/Articles/MetaTags.html

Answer 7

Hopefully this helps someone, but I didn't want to set my viewport width=device-width.. because its 480px on iphone 4.. and I want my game to be at 800px for all devices.

And if you don't set it, then minimal-ui doesn't register.

My work around is doing:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimal-ui">

And then changing the viewport once the page is loaded:

  $(window).load(function(){
    $('meta[name=viewport]').attr('content','width=800, maximum-scale=1')
  });

I'm pretty shocked it works. The address bar and lower UI buttons only appear if the user clicks the top/bottom of the screen. Love it now.

Answer 8

This solution worked for me, but in my case, the webapp was for a private public, where I had control of the Ipad that would be used.

I tried to use all possible meta tags and hacks, and really, after IOS8 have removed the minimal-ui feature, was practically impossible to solve.

Thinking outside the box, our team reached a nice solution:

The Mercury browser opens in fullscreen, and even when pages are being charged, the address bar does not appear. It is a small icon on the bottom right and only :) It worked perfectly for our problem!

But I repeat: do not use it if you are developing a webapp for the public in general. It's terrible for the UX force your user to download a different browser to access the app.

UPDATE

A developer friend of mine came up with this solution:

Use a webview inside of Titanium from appcelerator. It won't be aproved on Apple store, but for a private event, it'll work just fine!