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Viewport behavior in Safari 26 is utterly broken. 🙄😭 Time to get Viewports into #Interop2026 because viewports on iOS have gotten only worse since I did the initial research in, *checks notes*, 2022 — github.com/web-platform...

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That lines up with what I saw yesterday (*). The entire viewport shifts up (and therefore also fixedpos elements) and it’s stuck halfway underneath the clock. (*) For some reason I can’t reproduce this today. See blue box in the attached screenshots for yesterday (11PM-ish) and today (10AM-ish)

In my case the fixed elements (possibly the entire viewport actually, but not noticeable on a normal page) go up and down as I scroll the page. They end up in the right position when Safari's UI is expanded, and too high up when it is collapsed. Showing the keyboard seems to trigger the behavior.

We're seeing lots of weird issues when the browser UI is set to "top" (in Settings > App > Safari). Seems to be what Bruno described. I haven't checked viewport yet (I can only handle so much on one day...)

The compact mode is truly awful. Kinda wish they'd give up with that design, they already abandoned it a few years back but somehow it came back even worse...

Not to mention the bug where fixed element with top:0; sometimes go under the status bar, depending on the direction of scroll. Oh, and the completely unpredictable way Safari seems to color the status bar and space behind the address bar based on the backdrops it thinks are relevant. It’s a mess.

I’ve been a happy Safari user and advocate for well over a decade, and I’ve defended it because I’ve always felt like 99% of bugs devs complain about stem from a lack of testing. But today is different. Safari iOS is utterly broken, and I’m fed up with it.

My observation is that on iOS (in portrait mode) the behavior is _always_ `viewport-fit=contain` and on iPadOS it’s always `viewport-fit=cover` … 🤷‍♂️

Landscape Mode in Safari 26 on iOS does seem to respect `viewport-fit=cover` but it has other struggles. bsky.app/profile/bram...

Bramus@bram.us

Oh Landscape Mode ... 😮‍💨 (You have to trigger the app switcher in order to get the viewport to stretch out to the top edge)

No, it's a bug. The problem shown in the screenshots is that the entire viewport shifts up. This bug gets triggered after you've focused an input. Safe area insets help when you've got `viewport-fit=cover` set … but Safari on iOS (in portrait mode) refuses to do so :-/

The latter could be a design choice, but I think it's a step back because it prevents you from having a backdrop that actually spans edge-to-edge. See attached screenshots: the blurred backdrop does not go behind the top and bottom bars. This is something native apps are allowed to do.

The viewport behavior of Safari 26 on iPadOS is behaving much better than on iOS. A quick check tells me using `viewport-fit` in the viewport meta tag doesn’t do anything. It’s always kinda like `cover` but without it extending to underneath the address bar (which you could do before IIRC)

Also: what’s up with that padding on the left you get when the window becomes wider? Maybe this is for Stage Manager (which I am not using)?

(The `viewport-fit=cover`-like behavior on iPadOS is the exact opposite of the behavior on iOS, where it always uses `viewport-fit=contain`)