Overview
- Reviews of the iPhone Duo highlighted that Safari’s right-aligned controls eat into the outer display’s narrow width and leave less room for web content.
- Apple’s WebKit team confirmed in its Safari 27.1 notes that webpages do not currently extend beneath those side-mounted controls and that Safari fills the strip with the page’s background color.
- Apple warned developers that using the HTML viewport meta tag with viewport-fit="cover" can hide important site elements because many pages do not reserve safe margins around content.
- Safari 27.1 does introduce one targeted change: PDFs viewed on the Duo show two pages side-by-side when the device is held partially folded and revert to one page when flat or closed.
- Apple is asking for developer feedback as it investigates safer options such as new APIs, CSS signals, or platform heuristics to let sites use the outer display without creating compatibility problems.