Apple is looking for a way to let websites use more of the iPhone Duo's outer display, but it has not settled on an approach.
For now, Safari 27.1 confines webpages to the area beside its side-mounted controls and fills the remaining strip with the page's background color. That limits the width available for content on the outer screen. Apple put the controls on the side because the outer display is shorter and wider than other iPhone screens, and a side placement saves height for apps and webpages.
In a WebKit post on October 23, Apple's Jen Simmons said an existing web setting, viewport-fit="cover", could already let pages extend beneath the controls. The catch is that developers must then leave enough space around important content on every edge. Simmons said Apple's research suggests many sites fail to do that, so switching it on broadly could leave buttons and text hidden under the interface.
Apple is investigating an option with finer control. Its example: a header's background could span the whole screen while the navigation links stay in the unobstructed portion.
The tradeoff is familiar for a browser maker. A safe default wastes screen space, while a bolder one risks breaking sites whose developers never heard of the new hardware. Apple has picked safe, and its own research explains why: an opt-in only works if sites opt in carefully. A design that lets backgrounds bleed while content stays put would shift some of that burden from site authors to the browser.
Safari 27.1 also adds automatic two-page PDF viewing when the iPhone Duo is held partly folded like a book. Flatten or close the device and the document returns to a single page.
The open question is whether Apple's finer-grained option ends up as something developers must learn from scratch or something that works on existing pages without their help.