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martyyn

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#320142 10-Jul-2025 15:56
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I've been hosting websites and working with Wordpress for nearly 15 years now. Nothing fancy, just helping local businesses as best I can. Simple sites, supported themes and plugins only. I first started with HTML in the mid 90's so I'm capable of building from scratch too with a range of languages and CMS's.

 

But over the years I've come to have a growing resentment of iPhones. Whenever there is a problem, it's always someone with an iPhone.

 

One client would lose their email password every time they ran an iOs update. Then it would try to access the account multiple times over the next 15 minutes resulting in their IP address being locked from the website.

 

Another couldn't use anchor links, you know, just plain old domain.com/#contact-us. Everyone else in the company could, on their desktops, laptops and mobiles, but not these two iPhones. They opened the correct page but just stopped randomly in the middle of the site.

 

One client has given up trying to work out the caching on his macbook, he just makes his updates and reboots it to check if it's worked or not.

 

And finnaly today, I've just been in a meeting to potentially take over and rebuild an existing site. One of the issues they raised was the Hero section not being responsive. It was a simple coloured background, an icon, an H1, and a two line <P>. Every device we had on hand was fine, Dell and HP laptops of various sizes and resolutions, Oneplus, Samsung and Oppo phones, but there was one person in the room, with an iPhone, showing they had to scroll down two pages to get past the H1 because it wouldn't resize like every other device.

 

Am I imagining this or do others find these issues as well?


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Behodar
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  #3392837 10-Jul-2025 15:59
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While I haven't run into those issues specifically, I'm quite sure that recent versions of iOS (and MacOS) are a buggy mess. I really want Apple to "skip a year" and just focus on fixing bugs instead of adding new features.




BlakJak
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  #3392838 10-Jul-2025 16:18
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You talk about 'Iphone' but not about browser. Have the iPhone users tried alternative browsers? Great way to illustrate where the problem actually lies.

 

But yes, webdev to try to get graceful support across multiple browsers and devices is a bit of witchcraft and i do wonder the point at which you simply say 'it's not my fault'





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martyyn

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  #3392839 10-Jul-2025 16:42
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That's a good question, I've always used Chrome, FF and Edge to check layouts on my devices along with various emulators and screen resize tools but I've assumed those iPhones were using Opera.

 

I absolutely am at the point now where I say "its not my fault" but my iPhone users struggle to understand the difference between FHD and 4K let alone trying to explain @media queries and responsiveness.

 

 




RunningMan
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  #3392840 10-Jul-2025 16:47
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martyyn: but I've assumed those iPhones were using Opera.

 

Particularly with non technical users they'd be far more likely to be using the default Safari than Opera.


martyyn

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  #3392841 10-Jul-2025 16:48
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Sorry, that's what I meant.

 

You can see I don't like them, I can't even bring myself to hold one and look at it !!


Ragnor
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  #3392842 10-Jul-2025 16:50
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 All alternative browsers on IOS are generally just different skins for the bundled webkit engine/view in the OS, this is a common limitation on mobile OSs (it's pretty similar on Android)

 

Might still be worth a try if the issues you are seeing in the mobile safari app rather than the webkit engine.


 
 
 
 

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BlakJak
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  #3392891 10-Jul-2025 17:27
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I had the impression Firefox was the major standout from that approach. I havn't had an iPhone since the iPhone 4 so i'm a bit rusty in that world, admittedly.





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gzt

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  #3392892 10-Jul-2025 17:29
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Apple requires all iOS apps including browsers are based on Webkit Safari.

Other browsers on iOS ans iPadOS are more or less a skin on the platform mandated Webkit Safari. Chrome, Firefox, Opera etc etc.

Webkit Safari is bundled with every ipos update. There are a variety of behavior differences and bugs on each different device model with the exact same ios. You either workaround for specific versions or wait to see how soon and what the next update will bring if anything.

gzt

gzt
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#3392893 10-Jul-2025 17:34
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Why is it always iPhones ?

Big seller. Less issues now that os auto update is on by default imo. Also, more issues now that os auto update is on by default.

Goosey
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  #3393064 11-Jul-2025 06:36
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martyyn:

 

Sorry, that's what I meant.

 

You can see I don't like them, I can't even bring myself to hold one and look at it !!

 

 

 

 

well you need to check the browser…. Most Likley they use the bog standard safari.

 

Teach the user to use chrome and then have a notice / message on your website saying “best viewed with xx browsers”.


Behodar
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  #3393117 11-Jul-2025 07:33
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Goosey:

 

have a notice / message on your website saying “best viewed with xx browsers”.

 

 

*twitch*

 

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." - Tim Berners-Lee


 
 
 

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alasta
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  #3393133 11-Jul-2025 08:56
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I am a non-technical person and I can't recall ever having a problem viewing a web site on my iPhone. If I saw a notice telling me to install another browser then I wouldn't consider it to be worth the hassle. 


jarledb
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  #3393135 11-Jul-2025 09:07
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I have some bad news for you. If you are going to be making websites, you are going to have to test for it working across browsers and OSes.

 

You sound like you don't have any affinity for Apple products, but iOS and iPhones are a huuuge part of the market, and ignoring them is a really bad idea.

 

If you have a Mac you can use the developer tools in Safari to debug your sites and layouts. You can even hook up an iPhone and debug in Safari on the laptop to see exactly what is going wrong.





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RunningMan
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  #3393139 11-Jul-2025 09:11
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martyyn:

 

You can see I don't like them, I can't even bring myself to hold one and look at it !!

 

 

Respectfully, perhaps time to revisit your position. If you genuinely won't even look at an iPhone it's not that surprising you're having difficulty with them.


Benjip
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  #3393149 11-Jul-2025 09:56
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As someone who builds websites for a living, I can't possibly disagree with you any more than I already do.

 

iOS Safari has 41% market share in Australasia, with Chrome at 50%. And iOS Chrome runs on the same layout/rendering engine as iOS Safari.

 

If you would like to exclude 91% of the local mobile market, by all means continue with your backward thinking of "Apple bad!". It'll probably send more work my way ;)


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