This fixes one of my biggest annoyances with iOS7 Safari - that it 'steals' 50px or so of tappable space at the bottom of the screen. If you try to use it, it shows the bottom bar instead of allowing you to interact with the page.
That said, this is kind of not-good-at-all. An individual page shouldn't be able to control UI like this, IMO. A lot of the changes Apple made to Safari in iOS7 were bad ones, and they seem to have invented a new meta tag to get around admitting that they mis-stepped.
Agree in principle but I think with the web being so varied it's hard to have a one size fits all.
Certainly it shouldn't be abused for general websites, but for sites that represent something that's more 'app like' say a game, it's a fair way of indicating to the browser we'd like the UI removed more than not.
Chrome on Android does that. I hate it. Whenever I scroll a line or two too far and want to scroll back, I have to go twice as far because the chrome decides to come back. I would welcome an alternative though.
It is actually a bit worse than that. The Chrome display changes on scroll also fire a window resize event, causing pages that use this information to reflow when you just scrolled. I suppose they were thinking people don't ever size anything based on window height?
That said, this is kind of not-good-at-all. An individual page shouldn't be able to control UI like this, IMO. A lot of the changes Apple made to Safari in iOS7 were bad ones, and they seem to have invented a new meta tag to get around admitting that they mis-stepped.