Intent to Implement and Ship: request fullscreen on orientation change

[Mounir Lamouri]

Contact emails

mlam...@chromium.org, zqz...@chromium.org

 

Spec

https://fullscreen.spec.whatwg.org/#allowed-to-request-fullscreen

 

Summary

Allow web pages to request fullscreen while an orientation change event handler is running. This will allow pages to go fullscreen when the user turn their device.

 

Motivation

It is a fairly common user experience on native applications to go fullscreen in landscape mode and not fullscreen in portrait mode. Websites can't implement the same behaviour on the mobile web.

 

Interoperability and Compatibility Risk

Firefox: public support

Edge: no public signal but positive signal when reaching out

Safari: no public signal

Web Developers: Positive

 

We have been able to get feedback (public or private) from all browsers apart from Safari. However, Safari doesn't implement Fullscreen API nor Screen Orientation API on mobile so all browsers implementing the involved APIs are supportive. All the specifications have been changed accordingly.

 

Worth noting that the orientation change event is received by the page after the application has changed orientation so the fullscreen request will happen on the following frame, creating a potentially visible transition. This is not perceptible on builds we have but more importantly, browser vendors we reached out to were fine with the compromise. We could fix the issue by creating new APIs that could potentially make the transition smooth but Chrome couldn't implement this today so designing such an API wouldn't make sense. Other browsers didn't seem interested either. It seems that vendors are in agreement that the perfect is the enemy of good here.

 

Ongoing technical constraints

No.

 

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes. However, orientation changes are pretty much mobile-specific. It should work on Windows tablets, for example.

 

OWP launch tracking bug

https://crbug.com/628603

 

Link to entry on the feature dashboard

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5671161102860288

 

Requesting approval to ship?

Yes.

 

Cheers,

-- Mounir

[Philip Jägenstedt]

LGTM1

I was the one who brought up the bad frame issue. It could probably be avoided with a more declarative approach, but without a real implementation to prove it the risk is that the API is less powerful and still doesn't avoid bad frames in practice. With the current approach, in the worst case (long term) we will end up with two ways of going fullscreen on screen orientation, where one is permanently supported but discouraged. That's a risk worth accepting I think.

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM2

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[TAMURA, Kent]

LGTM3.

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TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

[Eugene Girard]

Cool!

ChromeOS supports rotation, especially on convertible devices such as the ASUS Chromebook Flip. +bruthig who implemented the rotation animation there.

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[PhistucK]

This caused the beta blog post to state something a bit weird -

"Developers can now use Element.requestFullScreen() to trigger full screen mode after a screen orientation change in addition to after a user gesture."

Since Chrome does not support requestFullScreen (which should actually be requestFullscreen - no capital S), but only the prefixed version, that paragraph sounds a bit like unprefixing of the fullscreen API.

☆PhistucK

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