The new iPhone Duo offers a fresh design for users, but it brings some growing issues when browsing the web. Jen Simmons from the WebKit team recently confirmed that Apple is looking into a way to improve how websites look on the phone’s smaller 5.4-inch outer display. Early reviewers noticed that Safari places its main controls on the right side of the screen, which severely shrinks the area left over for reading actual webpage content.
Engineers want to help developers use the outer screen space better
While the current setup stops buttons from overlapping with text, it makes reading regular articles feel surprisingly cramped. The company acknowledged that web pages currently cannot stretch behind these right-aligned navigation controls. Simmons explained that simply forcing websites to stretch across the full width could hide important content or break layouts.
Instead, the team is looking for a smarter and easier way to let web designers fill the entire outer display. Simmons used the WebKit blog to ask developers for their ideas on how to solve this space issue.
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Current workarounds are messy so the company is asking for help
Many users have pointed out that the web just is not built for this specific screen shape yet. Some people think the company should have kept the standard iPhone layout instead of trying to move the controls to the side.
At the moment, there is no official timeline for when a software update might change how the browser handles this weird screen ratio. For now, most users agree that scrolling through long websites is much easier when you unfold the device and use the larger inner screen. If you have a solid idea on how to fix this layout issue, the WebKit team is ready to hear your feedback.
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