If you have developed a webapp in the last year you probably used a meta viewport like this:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, user-scalable=0, minimal-ui”>

in order to gain a little more real estate for your application reducing the chrome of mobile Safari to minimal terms.

Just as a reminder, starting from iOS 7.1, setting the value minimal-ui in the meta viewport force mobile Safari to display the small version of the address bar and to hide the action bar at the bottom of the screen.

It’s a little piece of magic because you can get back a lot of space for your application; it’s a huge 13% more vertical pixels.

I was happy with it even if is not so clear that users have to touch the address bar to reveal the action bar at the bottom.

Bad News

With the release of iOS 8 Apple removed the minimal-ui value so you can’t get this 130 retina pixels back when you load your application.

The standard scroll behaviour is the same you got before the minimal-ui revolution: when scroll down the top bar shrinks and the bottom bar disappears; when scroll up (or tapping the address bar or the bottom of the screen) the bars come back to the normal state.

This simply means no more “fullscreen” for webapps.

Good News

While a lot of devs remove the minimal-ui value from their meta tags I think is a good idea to leave it in place because it is not completely useless.

Not every single iPhone owner will upgrade to iOS 8.
I don’t want to judge who does not wants to upgrade but a lot of iPhone 4 and 4s users still stay with iOS7 and, most important, still stay with a shorter screen.

The iPhone 4 and 4s screen is 960 retina pixels height.
In mobile Safari you have 742 available pixels with the normal chrome and 880 pixels with the compact chrome.

Starting from iPhone 5 the screen is 1136 pixels height.
In mobile Safari you have 918 available pixels with the normal chrome and 1056 pixels with the compact chrome.

This means that with an iPhone 4 with a minimal-ui enabled meta viewport, and iOS 7 still on device, you have almost the same vertical space of a full-chrome iPhone 5 with iOS 8 — 880 vs 918, just 38 retina pixels (or 19 CSS pixels).

It’s pretty the same space with just a little word.
Please, leave minimal-ui in your meta viewport.