Safari on iOS 7 killed the joy of landscape orientation!

[Thor774]

Surfing on the iPhone on iOS 6 was a joy in landscape mode.
Screen real state was preserved nicely by the nice gestures that accompanied the OS. The most obvious and useful was 1 tap to hide and show the UI.
In iOS 7 the wonderful one tap gesture has been replaced by the woeful swipe down gesture to show the UI. There are 2 big problems with this:
1. When you are scrolling when redding a webpage you normally just scroll the page down by swiping the screen up, but many times you want to return to a previous point in the article and when you swipe the screen down the UI is shown. The only way to avoid this is to let your finger be all the time on the screen so that the UI is not shown.
2. The problem will not be so terrible if the UI did not take so much space of an already tiny screen when working in landscape orientation. But the Safari UI in iOS 7 (and generally over all the OS) is HUGE. You lost so much real screen state when it is on that this just kills the experience.

Comm'on Apple: Give us back the option to 1 tap on the screen to show the GUI. Let us choose by ourselves between the horrendous new swipe down gesture or the magnificent 1 tap gesture of iOS 6. At least for Safari. The iPhone 5 has a very small screen when it's been used in landscape orientation.

Other apps like Evernote are also terribly affected by this.

 

[Givmeabrek]

Huh? I don't really understand. Just tap the top or bottom of the screen to bring up the menu options.

 

[Thor774]

Every time you scroll up on a page (swipe down gesture) the UI appears. This is not a problem when you are holding the phone in portrait position but the GUI takes too much space when you are holding it on landscape position. On iOS 6 the GUI did not appear when you were scrolling the page up as it happens now. You had to tap the screen once to make the GUI appear or disappear.

We are speaking of 25% of the screen space that is been used by the GUI when using Safari in landscape mode. I just want that they let us deactivate the swipe down gesture (that brings up the GUI / menus) and let us use instead the old tap once gesture from iOS 6. Like this you have much more control on when the GUI with the menus is going to be shown on the screen, not like now.

 

[C DM]

It would be nice to have somewhat better logic or even design for landscape orientation when it comes to all of that. Even simply being able to dismiss the controls quickly with a tap somewhere would be useful .

 

[JayLenochiniMac]

Every time you scroll up on a page (swipe down gesture) the UI appears.

That's because they assume you've read it as you've already gone down the page.

 

[Thor774]

That's because they assume you've read it as you've already gone down the page.

That is always the problem with assuming. Try it when you have the keyboard up, like now while replying to this thread from the iPhone. The space you get when scrolling up while you are writing on this reply field is ridiculous, only space for 3 text lines!

 

[Lucille Carter]

No problem here. I love iOS7 Safari!

 

[Thor774]

It would be nice to have somewhat better logic or even design for landscape orientation when it comes to all of that. Even simply being able to dismiss the controls quickly with a tap somewhere would be useful .

I agree that better logic is needed here. The iOS 6 logic was perfect: ONE TAP to show/hide the controls.

It is not difficult to hide the controls, you just swipe up on the screen (to scroll the page down) and they disappear. But it is annoying that the controls show up every single time you swipe down on the screen to scroll the page up.

As I said before, this is not a problem in portrait orientation where there is plenty of space to work with, the problem is in landscape orientation, specially then the keyboard is up. When the GUI with controls comes up you have just 3 lines left to work with on the screen.

I have sendt feedback to Apple on this. There is always hope that they give us the option to control this with tap-once I guess. In my opinion this is the logical way to show/hide controls, I have no idea why they had to change this...

 

[psac]

I agree that better logic is needed here. The iOS 6 logic was perfect: ONE TAP to show/hide the controls.

It is not difficult to hide the controls, you just swipe up on the screen (to scroll the page down) and they disappear. But it is annoying that the controls show up every single time you swipe down on the screen to scroll the page up.

As I said before, this is not a problem in portrait orientation where there is plenty of space to work with, the problem is in landscape orientation, specially then the keyboard is up. When the GUI with controls comes up you have just 3 lines left to work with on the screen.

I have sendt feedback to Apple on this. There is always hope that they give us the option to control this with tap-once I guess. In my opinion this is the logical way to show/hide controls, I have no idea why they had to change this...

I agree. I'm used to it now, but I still don't like it.