List of known "Safari on iPad" differences over "Desktop Safari"

In recently testing a web application on Windows/Mac desktop browsers - and then on an iPad I noticed various differences in Safari that I wasn't expecting. even though the version # is the same.

I'd like to compose a list of those differences (for myself and others) to have as a developer reference.

e.g. in Safari on the iPad

• iPad Safari takes full control of Select list/option styling
• iPad opens the onscreen keyboard when an input element receives focus, thus inline floating calendar widgets (and the like) may not work as expected (or need to be altered)
• iPad Safari doesn't support position:fixed like desktop Safari < iOS 5
• iPad Safari (similar to iPhone/iPodTouch Safari) automatically hyperlinks 10 digit numbers to offer phone #/contact options
• iPad Safari prompt('long message...','default'); shows only 1 line of the message (though it does provide scrolling of the message

I've heard from others that certain JavaScript doesn't work, etc. etc. but I have yet to fully test it thus I'd be grateful for any discoveries that you may have encountered.

A few more for you:

1. No Flash
2. Lousy iFrame support (so facebook like etc. needs a custom implementation for iPad)
3. Weird caching limitations
4. HTML textAreas doesn't get a scroll bar (you have to double-finger swipe - which of course, is amazingly intuitive)

In general. Treat it like a scaled up iPhone, not a scaled down Desktop.

I thought this might be useful: [Apple's guide to preparing web content for the iPad][1]

Just been caught out by the position:fixed issue my self

[1]: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2262/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40009577-CH1-DontLinkElementID_5 "Apples guild to WebPages for iPad"

Safari on iPad has the same issue with button width/padding as on the iPhone

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3430506/iphone-button-padding-unchangeable describes this problem and a solution for removing padding on a button with text, but this does not help you if you want a button to be narrower than the padding itself (e.g. for a button that only has a small icon on it). To do that, I had to surround the button with an outer element with a defined width and overflow: hidden like so:

<span style="border: solid 1px blue; display: block; width: 16px; overflow: hidden">
    <button style="-webkit-appearance: none; border-width: 0">&nbsp;</button>
</span>

(the blue border is to show where the button is, it's not critical to the hack)

jQuery's offset() doesn't work: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/6446

It also looks like iPad Safari has issues with elements with overflow:auto; that therefore should show scrollbars (test page with div's and iframe's).

iPad Safari seems to have trouble handling background images in rare cases, showing weird lines of lower lying content.

There's not a lot about this in Google (yet).

iPad browser doesnt support file uploading(even if it supports it will useless as iPad does not have a standard File Browser). The file field appears with a Choose File button grayed out.

Beside doesn't support scrollbar in TextAea, it seems that we can using javascript to make text in TextArea selected automatically too. This code will only move cursor to the end of text in TextArea.

<div>
  <textarea id="text-embed-code" autocapitalize="off" multiline="">
There is a fox running after chrome.
  </textarea>
  <button onclick="testSelectText(event);">select text</button>
</div>
<script>
  function testSelectText(e) {    
    var box = document.getElementById("text-embed-code");
    box.select();
    e.preventDefault();
    return false;
  }
</script>

There appears to be a bug in iPad Safari where a CSS element with both a background image and a background color is rendered with a slight border in the color of the background color. It should fill with the background image all the way to the edge of the rendered element.

I just had the same bug on my site, when trying to view it on an Ipad. The HTML structure is like:

<div class="main"> <!-- background-color: white -->
   <div class="left"></div> <!-- background-image: url(some_transparent_png) -->
   <div class="content">...</div>
   <div class="right"></div> <!-- background-image: url(some_transparent_png) -->
</div>

The left layer uses a background-image, whereas the main layer uses just a background-color. The Ipad view shows a slight border at the edge of the left and right layer.

When i add

 -webkit-background-size: 100% 100%;

to the left and right layer, the border disappears.

You can now control the styling of select lists on iOS by resetting it with -webkit-appearance: none;

This rule fixes animation flickering in Safari on iOS devices:

body {-webkit-transform:translate3d(0,0,0);}

There appears to be a bug in iPad Safari where a CSS element with both a background image and a background color is rendered with a slight border in the color of the background color. It should fill with the background image all the way to the edge of the rendered element.

24 bit transparent PNGS ABOVE A CERTAIN FILE SIZE don't render on the iPad2.
I can however get 8 bit ones of the same dimensions to render.
I haven't found out what this maximum file size is in order to get them to render.

I'm currently working on a small responsive web-app which makes heavy use of the iframe youtube api. Apparently the ipad version of safari doesn't support a few html5 methods which I use heavily in this project.

One of them is window.postMessage, which is a way of interacting with scripts on other pages, for example the a script that is used "within" that iframe. Autoplaying videos also doesn't work.

Frame problems. iPad Safari will both hide scrollbars and expand frames to the size of their content. Changing the frame tag to include scrolling="yes" and noresize="noresize" appears to do nothing. Some sites look fine on everything, even a Dreamcast browser, but not on iPad. The issue can be fixed using tables and iframes instead of normal framesetting (cols and rows, etc).

I also discovered that contenteditable is not supported in mobile safari, thus using a plain textarea is a better bet. Apple Developer Docs

position: fixed; 

Does not work in iOS 4 but does work on iOS 5.