[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 73412] Please add a way to prevent page rotation due to orientation changes

Thu Dec 1 00:53:51 PST 2011

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73412

--- Comment #2 from Paul Bakaus <pbakaus at zynga.com>  2011-12-01 00:53:51 PST ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> We're very concerned about the user experience here. We'd love to give the content the ability to lock or, more accurately, choose the orientation but:
> 
> - a nasty page might flip/flop endlessly

I understand this concern well. I think there's a viable middle ground though. It would be to not give the users an API to manually rotate the page, but at minimum, just allow "blocking" of orientationchange.

> - the user might be confused as to why their browser can rotate sometimes, not rotate other times, or even rotate when they have manually locked the orientation. Swapping tabs might trigger a rotation, for example.

This is still a problem, even with my toned down solution above. I really can only weight one thing against another. Is it worse to slightly confuse users or to very much block web apps from working the way they're supposed to? Detecting the rotation after layout is super super ugly.

I imagine we could do a notification/request, telling the user "This website can only be displayed in landscape mode. To you want to allow it to block rotation?" or something. That'd be fair enough.

> 
> So, this is probably best suited to "web apps" rather than general pages in the browser.
> 
> Interested to hear any thoughts you (or anyone listening) may have.

I started to completely ignore web apps on iOS. I just don't believe users get it - I want to see stats of click-through rates, pinning it to the home screen.

We *must* stop thinking of web apps as apps that are pinned as an app. Gmail running in Safari is a web app.

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