Home screen Safari bookmarks don't open in Safari

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Level 1

10 points

Home screen Safari bookmarks don't open in Safari

Hi,

So. I found a problem, that I've never encountered before and began to wonder, if there's any kind of solution for this. I recently bookmarked the mobile version of TrueAchievements.com (http://m.trueachievements.com/) from Safari to my home screen. The problem is, that when I open the link from my home screen, it doesn't run in Safari, but instead in some kind of other "browser". In this "browser", the normal gestures (mainly swiping your finger across the screen to make the browser to go 'back' one page) don't work. In the mobile version of the TA.com page you don't get a back button when you for example browse achievements from a certain game. The only way to return to the previous page is to return back to home screen and click on the link again. If you go to the mobile site via Safari, the gestures work, so the problem occurs only when accessing the site via home screen bookmark. Also, the address bar and other 'regular' Safari buttons aren't visible when accessing the site via home screen bookmark. This is the only mobile site I've encountered the problem with, but it got me curious. What is this 'not-so-safari' -browser where the bookmark opens and what might be the solution to this, other than bookmarking the site inside Safari ofcourse. Tested on iPhone 4 and iPhone 5S, both running the latest iOS7 version (7.0.6).

iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.6

Posted on Mar 5, 2014 1:59 PM

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Answer 1

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matt00

Level 5

4,041 points

Mar 7, 2014 6:40 AM in response to laorj

Hey laorj,

Thanks for the question. This is expected behavior, should the designer of the website choose to have the site optimized as a “web application”. The designer of the website has included a string of code, which executes the website in “standalone mode” (I can confirm that the website you have referenced is using this method).

For more information, see the following excerpt from our developer library:

Hiding Safari User Interface Components

On iOS, as part of optimizing your web application, have it use the standalone mode to look more like a native application. When you use this standalone mode, Safari is not used to display the web content—specifically, there is no browser URL text field at the top of the screen or button bar at the bottom of the screen. Only a status bar appears at the top of the screen. Read “Changing the Status Bar Appearance” for how to minimize the status bar.

Set the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag to yes to turn on standalone mode. For example, the following HTML displays web content using standalone mode.

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

You can determine whether a webpage is displaying in standalone mode using the window.navigator.standalone read-only Boolean JavaScript property. For more on standalone mode, see “apple-mobile-web-app-capable” in Safari HTML Reference.

via Safari Web Content Guide: Configuring Web Applications

Thanks,

Matt M.

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