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Safari on iPadOS Optimized to Work With at Least Some Desktop Versions of Websites

oneMadRssn said:
This whole narrative is a bit frustrating. iPhoneOS 1.0 promised a "desktop class browser" back in 2007. Look at this press release for example:

View attachment 841353
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the-Phone-with-iPhone/

The whole point from the very beginning of iPhone was that the browser was a proper real browser and better than that WAP crud we had before. Then mobile optimization happened and we seemed to have ended up with something better than WAP but still not the promised desktop-class browser.

We keep being promised desktop-class browsing, but that seems to be elusive. What gives?
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WAP was terrible but for different reasons. iPhone was serving up what you see on the web as there was no real mobile agent or people developing for mobile. Turns out doing "desktop" browsing on a 3.5 - 4 inch screen was a terrible experience. Hence why developers worked toward responsive UI
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Ronlap said:
I travel over 100K a year and I am carrying two similarly-sized displays and two batteries; the ones in my 13" MacBook Pro and the others in my 11" iPad Pro. What I would *really* like to see is a keyboard module that when snapped onto an iPad changes it to a MacBook.

That is, the iPad works like an iPad when undocked, but when docked, it becomes the display for a MacBook and optionally can add to the laptop's battery capacity or give it some additional processing power.
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I'm almost positive they will be converging MacOS and ipadOS in the next 3-4 years.. I really hope the marriage is more MacOS than ipadOS but we'll see..
 
Shawn Parr said:
I don't think I have ever seen a more inaccurate summary in my life. Holy cow this is off the rails:



No, a user agent doesn't retrieve or render anything. It is a string, just some text, that say what browser it is and what version, and often lists similar browser rendering engines that it should be compatible with. It is literally just a description of the browser. The server then determines what to send back based on that.



Not even close. Safari on iPad changes how it responds to certain events in on the page. There is no re-rendering. The big obvious one is that if an element has both a hover and a click event, iPad Safari sends the hover first, then waits to see if the page changes at all (as it would on any desktop browser when hovered over, i.e. not re-rendered), and if it does change then it doesn't send the click, so that the user can see the new content and decide to tap on a new option. If the page doesn't change it sends the click after a short delay (a couple hundred milliseconds is what they said in the session on Desktop class browsing at WWDC).

The big change is that Safari on iPad now reports, via the user agent, that it is MacOS, not iOS, and they've updated how it handles events that can have conflicts on a touch based device.
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Thank you so much for this explanation. I've been wondering what specifically had changed.
 
I so look forward to this iPadOS but I think it is just the tactics of Apple by gradually giving you what you are supposed to have to make you stick with them
 
oneMadRssn said:
This whole narrative is a bit frustrating. iPhoneOS 1.0 promised a "desktop class browser" back in 2007. Look at this press release for example:

View attachment 841353
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the-Phone-with-iPhone/

The whole point from the very beginning of iPhone was that the browser was a proper real browser and better than that WAP crud we had before. Then mobile optimization happened and we seemed to have ended up with something better than WAP but still not the promised desktop-class browser.

We keep being promised desktop-class browsing, but that seems to be elusive. What gives?
Click to expand...
For 2007 it was.
 
Can someone try a Facebook Group to see if it renders as a desktop version on safari. It rarely does for me.
 
Just installed iPadOS on my iPad Air 2 and it works perfectly!
Safari is so awesome and it makes me love my iPad once again!
Apple has successfully save the planet and also stop me from buying a surface go.
 
Shawn Parr said:
I don't think I have ever seen a more inaccurate summary in my life. Holy cow this is off the rails:



No, a user agent doesn't retrieve or render anything. It is a string, just some text, that say what browser it is and what version, and often lists similar browser rendering engines that it should be compatible with. It is literally just a description of the browser. The server then determines what to send back based on that.



Not even close. Safari on iPad changes how it responds to certain events in on the page. There is no re-rendering. The big obvious one is that if an element has both a hover and a click event, iPad Safari sends the hover first, then waits to see if the page changes at all (as it would on any desktop browser when hovered over, i.e. not re-rendered), and if it does change then it doesn't send the click, so that the user can see the new content and decide to tap on a new option. If the page doesn't change it sends the click after a short delay (a couple hundred milliseconds is what they said in the session on Desktop class browsing at WWDC).

The big change is that Safari on iPad now reports, via the user agent, that it is MacOS, not iOS, and they've updated how it handles events that can have conflicts on a touch based device.
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Yea, you should read 9to5mac try to describe how cookies work. Your head would explode.
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now i see it said:
12 years
12 years!

Since iPhone was first revealed and many websites are completely unusable on iOS. The web experience on iPhone is so hit or miss due to VERY lazy webmasters. It's often like 1995 (or a lot worse) browsing the web on iPhone.

Wake up lazy webmasters! There's a billion of us iPhone users
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Lol it sounds like you are stuck in 1995 using the term “webmaster”. This is such a ridiculous oversimplification but ill make sure they get the message at the annual webmaster guild gathering.
 
sqdldr said:
Yea, you should read 9to5mac try to describe how cookies work. Your head would explode.
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Ha! I know a shocking amount of web devs who don’t understand cookies, or HTTPS, or a lot of other web technologies that they are using.

It wasn’t all that long ago that I was arguing with some about why they shouldn’t make the assumption that a site would be non-SSL when not displaying a login prompt.
 
opeepingtomo said:
Office 365 web (excel, word, PowerPoint) apps work ?
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Haven't tested the others but I spent a little time in Word Online and it seems to work exceptionally well. All the toolbars, context menus and file selectors etc. seem to work well. Works way better than iCloud Pages, funnily enough.
 
Any chance this functionality will make it to the (non-iPad) iOS devices?
Just spoofing the UA isn't enough; you have to get round viewport and screen size/resolution detections to defeat the 'responsive design' problem.

As so many others have pointed out; the iPhone originally enabled full desktop web navigation in the palm of your hand, with virtually zero limitations or trade-offs.
Then along came the incompetent web devs who thought they would limit or capitalise on this new device class through detection and removing/restricting functionality while enforcing massive text, and single column views.
There are a lot of cases where the 'request desktop site' option doesn't work.
 
I am waiting for this for one reason: To use Google Drawings on the iPad. We use tons of these both inside docs and as separate images and since there is no Drawing app this would be a bonus if it worked in browsers (presumably chrome will also work once safari does on iPad, right?). Has anyone tried Google Drawings on iPad OS?
 
Googlyhead said:
Any chance this functionality will make it to the (non-iPad) iOS devices?
Just spoofing the UA isn't enough; you have to get round viewport and screen size/resolution detections to defeat the 'responsive design' problem.

As so many others have pointed out; the iPhone originally enabled full desktop web navigation in the palm of your hand, with virtually zero limitations or trade-offs.
Then along came the incompetent web devs who thought they would limit or capitalise on this new device class through detection and removing/restricting functionality while enforcing massive text, and single column views.
There are a lot of cases where the 'request desktop site' option doesn't work.
Click to expand...


Posts 48 and 59 have a link to the video you can watch to see what all it is doing.

To answer directly: If the page sets the metadata to be responsive the browser will check that it doesn’t set the elements on the page to be larger than the actual viewport, as this is a sign that the responsive design is not working properly. In that case they will scale the image to fit within the viewport. They may be doing some other checks to ensure that the responsive design is actually responding correctly, but I don’t recall them mentioning any specifics.

Between the user agent, and the reported viewport size, a properly developed responsive site should appear on iPadOS the same as it would on a desktop with a smaller monitor.
 
eatrains said:
There's no reason Safari couldn't just render a larger viewport. The media queries would be none the wiser.
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Yes, but that would create an awful experience. For instance, developers and designers often fix font sizes based on the viewport. If the viewport is a lie, then the resulting text will be too large / small for the actual viewport.
 
Donovan Dillon said:
I’m loving the improvements — however iCloud.com is still rendering the mobile site which launches the discrete apps. I can’t wait for this to be corrected.
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This has been corrected on iPad OS 13 Beta 2! Safari iPad OS now renders the desktop version of iCloud.com.
 
Donovan Dillon said:
I’m loving the improvements — however iCloud.com is still rendering the mobile site which launches the discrete apps. I can’t wait for this to be corrected.
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Issue corrected with iPadOS 13 Beta 2, and still working with Beta 3. It’s remarkable how much more utility the iPad delivers with this seemingly small improvement.
 
MacRumors said:



Apple's upcoming iPadOS is designed to bring more desktop-class functionality to iPads with bigger screens, and as part of that aim, Safari is receiving a major overhaul that will enable it to display desktop versions of websites.

​

In the first instance, Apple is going about this by adapting Safari's mobile "user agent" - that aspect of the software which retrieves and renders interaction with web content - to enable the iOS browser to retrieve the desktop variety of a website by default, rather than its mobile counterpart.

iPadOS will incorporate several features that recognize the tablet's function as a potential computer replacement, including a new Home screen, an updated Split View to enhance multitasking, improved Apple Pencil support, and additional keyboard shortcuts for use with physical keyboards. iPadOS is due to get its public release in the fall.

Article Link: Safari on iPadOS Optimized to Work With at Least Some Desktop Versions of Websites
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I assume that Apple still will not allow webm playback within a player?
BTW, anyone know why they won't allow it? It is the main reason I normally use my laptop these days for surfing rather than my ipad pro.
 
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